Ask HN: Teaching kids to program? - <AUTHOR> Somewhere around the age of 6-7, my Dad taught my the basics of programming in HyperCard (HyperTalk) on his Mac SE. There were whole worlds inside of HyperCard Stacks, and it was so much fun playing around with my home card and very basic scripts that played music, drew things on the screen, bounced around clip art figures, etc.
I also played with BASIC around the same time, and have rather fond memories of sneaking into his office and making little "Hello World" type programs on his Casio FX-5200P when he wasn't paying attention.
My oldest son will be turning 6 later this year and he has developed a great interest in mobile devices and such lately, so I'm looking for something that would provide a similar experience to mine, but within the context of his generation.
I don't think the robot turtles type of board games are really it. Intuitively I feel like I'm looking for a mobile app that is some kind of cross between Quartz Composer and Hypercard, but then I'm not really sure what I'm looking for either. Anyone have any input?
(I've looked at the previous asks here, but they are either > 3 years old - a lot has changed - or didn't have any traction.) <comment><USER2> I volunteer at a CoderDojo in Istanbul. We currently teach 7-11 year olds, though we had a 6-year-old for a few months and she fit in nicely.

Actually, ours is more of a Maker dojo; we do electronics and more classical kids' activities as well, depending on their interests at the time.

For all its shortcomings, Scratch has been the cornerstone of our program. I strongly recommend giving it a try and see where it takes your kid.

For a 6 year old and as a mobile app, Scratch Jr. might be more appropriate. It's usually what we suggest younger siblings (4-6) to try. We've also used it successfully in the past as a stepping stone.

Then there's App Inventor, block based and very similar to Scratch, which lets you create Android applications. We have some older kids (12, 13) making money off Play Store :)

Consider joining a Coder Dojo. Also consider founding one yourself.

(Sorry if this is too concise. I'm tired and on mobile)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is my answer for a recent ask. I hope you will find it helpful: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11512466)

Edit: Addendum- RFO BASIC is a great way to make apps for Android, on Android [http://rfobasic.com](http://rfobasic.com) [http://laughton.com/basic/](http://laughton.com/basic/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a very nice list, so please don't take it the wrong way that it's not what I'm looking for.

It is increasingly apparent that the next generation is going to be using mobile - perhaps exclusively - so I'm looking for something mobile specific.

Edit: I should clarify by mobile specific that I mean the app itself runs on mobile, not just something that can target a mobile app.

<comment><USER4> Programmers of the next generation will not use tablets or smartphones as a development platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> You may be right, but I don't think they will be using desktops either. Perhaps some kind of virtual desktop enabled by VR/AR.

I work on a college campus, and a significant and increasing number of kids have no laptop or desktop at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have you looked at Microsoft touchdevelop? This might be just the thing

<comment><AUTHOR> Never heard of it. Looks interesting, feels a bit clunky, but I'll give it a go.

<comment><USER5> Also consider minecraft: [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the- minecraft-gen...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft- generation.html)

And today's front page article on "how a diode changed my life" could be interesting</comment></comment></comment>


Human flying with bird wings - <AUTHOR> http://www.humanbirdwings.net/about/first-test-with-wings/

<comment><USER2> Waring, this may be a fake video/viral ad for something similar to the "Liquid Mountaineering" one: <http://youtu.be/Oe3St1GgoHQ>

Part 13/14 has this eerie look&feel of the "Blair Witch Project" to it: <http://youtu.be/Q0tKFOcHyrI>

Sigh, I wish it's not a fake and it will be possible to purchase something like this 10 years from now...

</comment><comment><USER3> I was about to post this, pay attention to the fact he's using 2 android phones to control the engines and wii motion sensors... truly astounding.</comment>


Singularity 6 startup making MMO with focus on virtual community building - <AUTHOR> https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/08/singularity-mmo-ugc-virtual-world-startup.html <comment><USER2> I agree with the core insight here, I've always found that MMOs are lacking something when it comes to community building. I remember the community that I felt when I was playing the initial release of WoW and really knowing the people on my server. Not sure if that experience is something that can be repeated, it felt like it was just right for it's time.</comment>


Free energy for sale: Steorn's impossible Orbo hits the market - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2015/12/08/free-energy-for-sale-steorn.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702059](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702059)</comment>


What is the "right" level of funding for theoretical computer science research? - <AUTHOR> http://jonkatz.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/what-is-the-right-amount-of-funding-for-theory/ "More broadly, how would one go about determining how much money "should" be allocated to any of the different sub-areas of CS?" -- from Random Bits by Katz <comment><AUTHOR> "More broadly, how would one go about determining how much money "should" be allocated to any of the different sub-areas of CS?" - from Random Bits by Jonathan Katz</comment>


Google buries Digg deal. Marked as a dupe or just lame? - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/26/google-buries-digg-deal-marked-as-a-dupe/ <comment><USER2> I see what they did there</comment>


Rent control will make housing shortages worse - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/09/19/rent-control-will-make-housing-shortages-worse <comment><USER2> Discussed 4 days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21022491](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21022491)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure I understand these kind of articles. There's two harsh truth for me:

* It would be crazy not to rent a rent-controlled place in a market like SF. This is what everybody tries to do here, and honestly I would probably not have moved here if I couldn't have found a place without rent-control. It is just too risky (your rent can pretty much double in a week, forcing you to move out).

* SF's real housing problem is that there's a lack of housing. This has nothing to do with rent control, and focusing the story on rent control is like ignoring the bigger elephant in the room. It's a malicious distraction tactic. Check the numbers, the population of SF has remained extremely stabled since the 90s[1], the reason is that there's no more space for people to live.

Ask yourself this question, who would be the biggest benefactors from removing rent control?

[1]: [https://www.google.com/search?q=sf+population&oq=sf+populati...](https://www.google.com/search?q=sf+population&oq=sf+population+&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.3023j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

<comment><USER4> To your points:

1) People not moving to markets like SF because rent is too high _and telling employers that_ is exactly what _should_ happen! This forces employers to either lobby for more housing (a good thing) or open offices in reasonable cost of living locations (also a good thing) instead of continuing the status quo bubble. Rent control is a market distorting force in this case.

2) Rent control directly leads to fewer new housing units because there is a disincentive to create housing that's going to rent for below-market. If you want more housing, you should be opposed to rent control. I say this as someone who benefits greatly from rent control and still wants to see it die.

3) The population of SF has _not_ remained extremely stable since the 90s. Look at [1]. There were 140,000 fewer people in the 90s than there are today (a 20% increase)! Also your reasoning that "there's no more space for people to live" is demonstrably false. Go visit Tokyo and then tell me there's no space for more people in SF. There's no more space because zoning laws and height restrictions in the city are absolutely ridiculous and serve NIMBY interests.

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

Edit: since someone is no doubt going to ask, here's a good summary of the economic literature on the topic. It covers a variety of effects related to rent control: [https://econjwatch.org/File+download/238/2009-01-jenkins- rea...](https://econjwatch.org/File+download/238/2009-01-jenkins- reach_concl.pdf)

<comment><USER5> With respect to point (2), the argument doesn't really work for SF; rent control only applies to units built before 1979. New developments can raise the rent as much as they want.

You could argue the _threat_ of possibly having rent control discourages new building, but it's a much weaker argument.

Your points in (3) I think are much, much more relevant to the SF housing crisis than rent control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sure it will. In Denmark we actually have a split because of this. Buildings built before 199x have rent control, all new buildings can have "free" rent set. If you believe you are subject to an unfair rent, you can go before a comittee that can reduce or enforce it. A landlord can also get the rent preapproved by the same comittee, to avoid any risk. Any rent contract has to follow a certain format, and rent increases have to be listed in advance, such as "the rent for 2019 is x, and will increase each year in january by 3%".

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm no expert, but I do know that in Indianapolis we've had many housing developments in the downtown area that have a requirement for a certain percentage of units to be rented below market rate.

You have to apply to rent those units, and you must meet the income requirements, in that you can't make above a certain threshold if income. (Not sure what other factors are taken into consideration.)

To me, this seems like somewhat of middle ground between being 100% market- driven vs. full-on rent control.

<comment><USER8> They do this in New York too, I'm not sure of the scale or laws around it, but for new development I think they need a certain percentage of units as income restricted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The purpose of rent control is to keep existing tenants from getting priced out of their homes with annual rent increases, not to make housing affordable for new tenants.

<comment><USER10> It's the same in desirable European cities with rent control like Berlin and Vienna.

You read about people renting huge apartments there in the city center for decades paying something around 600/month while if you'd want to move in now into a similar sized apartment in a similar area you'd be paying a lot, _LOT_ more.

Rent control makes it affordable for people that have been living there long term but makes it more expensive for the ones trying to move in now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Who is posting these articles? Landlords? Rent is the most exploitative arrangement in the economy. There is a landed class, an aspiring class, and a class that is purely exploited. Everyone needs a place to live and it should be provided for free or at cost. The market is destructive and benefits the few at the expense of the many.

<comment><USER12> Would you care to explain? I'm a renter and I find it be a great arrangement. I have no interest in owning the property that I reside in. I can move anytime I want, I don't have to fix anything and I can park my money in things that return far more than a house.

<comment><USER13> Renting works well for highly-paid professionals who aren't committed to living in the area for the long haul and have plenty of money left over after paying their landlord. That's a very niche subset of people who rent. The more common scenario is people spend 1/2 to 2/3 of their take-home pay on rent to avoid a hellish commute, living with roommates in a poorly-managed building where the owners drag their feet fixing anything. These people don't have money to "park" in things that return far more than a house.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I know too many software engineers with $200k salaries living in $2000/Mo rent controlled apartments in San Francisco. They are the last people needing any help with their rent. Sometimes they have extra room they Airbnb which reduces their rent even further

<comment><USER15> Yes, rent control doesn't magically solve the problem by itself. But it shores up the defenses of less-advantaged renters. Of course some opportunistic high earners will insert themselves into this system. There should be something in place alongside rent control to minimize that.

<comment><USER16> I'm a free-market kind of person. But I think that the problem with politicians' / planners' tinkering here is that it's inherently gimped/broken. Tinkering and tweaking the rules/details of society only kinda works if you're able to do it a lot so you can constantly "respond" and stay ahead of the changes and responses in the market. Whether as byproducts of the regulations, or in opposition to them.

The market and the people that form part of it will always respond, and modest tinkering will always fall short because (from my perspective) it seems downright impossible to make version 2.0 after implementing version 1.0 of the tweaks. At best, you get 1.1 or 1.2, and after that a perpetual 1.x.xxxxx set of patches that are only tiny changes in order to appease special interest groups.

And the reason (I would posit) is that the rules/system of government we seem to have in place make this sort of stuff next to impossible. Whether it's from special interest groups, meddling activist judges, flip-flopping politicians, lobbying, partisan voting, corporate meddling, lack of real public buy-in and participation, lack of referendums, anything. It's gimped so we get the crappy part of the constant "tweaking" and "optimizing" by politicians, all while having to do PR for their changes/ideas and a public that is almost exactly divided on the issues.

<comment><USER17> And it seems pretty obvious to me that the rules now are (as much as they claim be pro-social justice), are only in the interests of property owners.

And it's not like rent control is the only way for there to be affordable housing. It's just a way that pretends to look out for lower income people, while actually benefiting entrenched property owners in a really perverse way.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


999-Year Lease - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_lease <comment><USER3> This isn't just a historical phenomenon, given that the Millennium Dome (opened in 2000) was also granted one. I wonder what the point of it is - <USER2> local governments in the UK not allowed to gift or sell land, only lease it?

<comment><USER4> IIRC it's a significant source of income for the British Royal Family. They own a lot of land.

<comment><USER5> UK land is technically "owned" by the Crown Estate [1], and revenue goes to the British government. The royal family get a percentage of this (called the Sovereign Grant [2]; née Civil List [3]).

[1] [https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/en- gb/resources/faqs/](https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/en-gb/resources/faqs/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Grant_Act_2011](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Grant_Act_2011)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_list#United_Kingdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_list#United_Kingdom)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My house is on land that's on a 999 year lease since 1870(ish) from the county that moved boundaries 40 years ago...and we have no idea who the the lease holder is... so that's fairly perpetual

<comment><USER7> So ... can you sell the house?

<comment><USER8> Generally, yes. You can sell the building on the land (which you own) and transfer the lease (sometimes for a fee, sometimes not). My family has a cabin North of Seattle, WA (USA) that is on land that a non-profit cultural association just renewed a 99 year lease on from a railroad (I forget which one). So long as you abide by the org rules sales are easy. I do not know how universal such set-ups are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This isn't just a UK thing. Well the 999-year lease is a UK/Commonwealth thing, but I've worked in NYC real estate, and a lot of projects have multiple hundred year leases.

And interestingly enough, there is a 99-year lease which the 99-year term was not literal, but merely an arbitrary time span beyond the life expectancy of any possible lessee (user) or lessor (owner). [1]

1: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99-year_lease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99-year_lease)

<comment><USER9> I believe I read somewhere (and it is one of the related articles on the page) that it was the 99-year lease that actually caused Hong Kong to lapse back to Chinese control.

<comment><USER10> A great reminder to always go with 999 years if you do anything country scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> the Guinness Factory ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness_Brewery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness_Brewery)) has a 9000 year lease... they pay IRL£45 per year for the lease... Not sure what that works out in Euro with inflation...

<comment><USER12> "The 9,000 year lease signed in 1759 was for a four-acre brewery site. Today, the brewery has expanded to cover over 50 acres. The 1759 lease is no longer valid as the company purchased the lands outright many years ago. So don't worry, we're not planning on going anywhere."

[https://www.guinness-storehouse.com/en/faq](https://www.guinness- storehouse.com/en/faq)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Guinness/Diageo in Dublin have one of these. A whole chunk of the city around Dublin 8. I think they had an advert that they are 250 years of their way through it.

<comment><USER11> It's 9000!

<comment><USER14> it was, but it got converted to a normal purchase.

The funnier part is that they (Diageo, the owners of Guiness) discussed moving out of the original brewery and the people got so angry that Diageo realized they had to keep it open.

<comment><USER13> Yeh I remember that. I would stop drinking Guinness forever if they tried that crap. And I'm sure most of Ireland would.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Legitimate question: why not just add 1 and make them thousand year leases? Easier to remember, easier to say, and practically equivalent.

<comment><USER16> Reminds me of the 'off by one' joke in CS. It actually is a 1000 year lease. The first year of the lease is year 0. So you make 999 lease payments and you have paid for all years up to and including year 999. The lease gets renewed at year 1000.

<comment><USER17> Are you saying 999 lease payments plus a down payment, or making an off-by-one error?

When I sign a 1-year lease on real estate, it's 1 year, not 2 years.

<comment><USER16> Its a terms thing, in a one year lease, let's say you sign it in December, and pay for the month of January. Now each month you make a payment for the "next" month, so in November (month 11) you make the final payment for December.

You have made 12 payments but the last one was in month 11. The first payment was made in month "0" :-) it happens "outside" the lease range.

In a 99 year lease (the more common ones) you make your first year payment and _then_ the lease starts. Then you make 99 more payments and at the end of the last year the least ends. Which will be the 100 year anniversary of the start of the lease.

<comment><USER18> yeah but in your example, nobody would call a 1 year lease an 11 month lease, because you have the thing for 12 months not 11

<comment><USER16> I don't name these things :-)

<comment><USER15> Well, why do we generally call two year leases two year leases, but thousand year leases 999-Year leases? Where is the cutoff point where we switch terminology?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A common thing in Singapore. Almost everything since the 60s has 99 or 999 year lease. HDBs in places like matter which are over 50 year old have low property processes even though it is a few stop to the down town.</comment>


A Much Needed Etiquette for Sharing Hacker News Links - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/a-much-needed-etiquette-for-sharing-hacker-news-links-39bc06f29bff <comment><USER2> The point being made is very strong. The person sending an article SHOULD be obliged to send their own additional thoughts along with a link!

Sadly, non-technical people simply WILL NOT attempt to understand what they're reading. So the real question is not the etiquette of the sender but of the receiver: do you HAVE to summarize and explain the content to the person who sent it to you?

I think the title of the article would be stronger if it were more generalized since this happens to ANYONE with a well-known area of expertise such as mathematicians, scientists, fans of book series, beekeepers, etc. I can't even imagine what nutrition experts have to put up with from friends and family. :-)</comment>


How bad are things? - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/24/how-bad-are-things/ <comment><USER2> I'm an addict in long term recovery, and I hang out with lots of addicts trying to get or stay clean. Obviously this crowd has problems!

But what's interesting is that as I've been making friends who aren't addicts, they have problems that are every bit as messed up as the recovery crowd. There are two main differences, though: "normal" people are much more committed to hiding their problems (I feel as though I only learn about them because people assume I won't judge them), and normal people don't recognize that their unhappiness is a solvable problem.

Furthermore, most of them aren't really into the solutions: a leveling of ego and pride, humility, rejection of desire and attachment, and living for something greater than themselves. Addicts, of course, have no choice -- we either develop the skills and tools needed to be happy enough to stay clean, or wallow on in the misery of drug addiction, often to an untimely death.

It's kind of sad, but I have no idea how to convince normal people that they can be happier by changing themselves instead of acquiring things or relationships or any other external thing they think will finally make them happy.

I feel as though erikpukinskis' comment about capitalism is a big part of the problem, but I'm not sure how to use that observation to help more people be happy.

Edit: C'mon HN, we're smart -- ideas on solutions to these problems are better than upvotes :-)

<comment><USER3> I don't mean any offense when I say this, but I kind of resent this type of perspective.

I can't say for sure but I suspect if we knew each other, I would fall into the "non-addict friend with problems" type category.

You do correctly point out that a lot of people worry whether they will be judged for revealing a problem. This has happened to me and my family quite severely. Long-term, deeply close friends have abandoned me; extended family scatters like roaches when the lights turn on; goodly people of the working class like pastors or coworkers just brush you off with annoying platitudes.

Human beings seem pretty hard-wired to pass judgement on other people due to their associates and circumstances. We absolutely are a "blame the victim" species through and through. If we can't even stop ourselves from blaming the victim in matters of rape or child abuse, how can we expect people to see others' problems clearly?

So, yeah, for people who aspire to some of the fruits of their working class labor, and who feel great pressure from "blame the victim" thinking, they sure as shit are paranoid about not coming off as though they "have problems" \-- and it's pretty disingenuous for you or me or anyone else to judge them for this and roll our eyes while we say they should be more zen and stop "wanting things" or "clinging to their pride" or whatever.

The other big thing though is that people really, truly can be victims of circumstance. People can have depression, for example, not because they are genetically predisposed to have depressive reactions to mostly-normal circumstances, but because they have normal, sane, healthy reactions to insane circumstances. Reacting to something by being depressed about it can be, and often is, totally healthy because it represents your body's correctly calibrated response to a circumstance that cannot be "lived with" and must be purged out of your life for survival.

I bring this up because I feel like a lot of people give extremely little thought to the problems other people have. We rationalize and look for one or two ways that it might "be their fault" (i.e. blame the victim) and if we can't find those, then we revert to Plan B which is to rationalize one or two ways that they could "get better but they won't" (e.g. they aren't currently seeing a counselor; they aren't currently on anti-depressants; they aren't currently in a support group; they refuse to have a less materialistic outlook on life; etc. etc.).

Our brains are wired to find or invent short-circuits out of actually empathizing with suffering people. Just like we want our shit to be flushed down the toilet bowl and to Just Stop Being Our Problem, we think along similar lines about the problems that others tell us, even close friends and loved ones.

What I can say for sure is that letting go of ego and pride has almost nothing to do with it; having humility has almost nothing to do with it; "reject desire and attachment" sounds nice on a poster, but that's just so thoroughly not human that I don't even know where to begin, let alone that it too has almost nothing to do with anyone's extrinsic circumstances.

I guess what I am saying is that a lot of people who have problems already are well aware that there is no "thing" that's going to make them happy. They aren't searching for that. And yet, being embedded in the life circumstances they are in causes real, visceral pain, and they have no choice but to try to find a way to not be in pain. There is no amount of perspective shifting that's going to just poof make a painful circumstance into a pain-free one.

And, to be quite blunt, for a lot of people, money absolutely would solve a huge number of their circumstantial problems. I don't want to make this comment any longer than it already is, so I'll just provide a link to a past comment that I made. It was on a thread discussing the semi-recent self- aggrandizing post from DHH about his magical foresight to know that wealth was never going to "truly" make him happy.

< [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10628129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10628129) >

Money is just one dimension of all this, sure. But I bring it up because one of the first things we all rush to bash is someone's "materialism" in the face of their problems. I have to believe this is some kind of Hansonian signalling dealie that's secretly about taking stuff from others, because it really is the case that money can solve a lot of problems in life. And instead of indoctrinating people with feel-good mantras about being less materialistic, we ought to be teaching them when and how to strategically employ their materialism _when it is for their own benefit_ and when to avoid letting it become excessive. Heuristics that are too sweepingly general, like "never be materialistic" frankly do more harm than good and probably lead people to worse living circumstances that feedback into the pressure to look like you're not having a problem and just magnify the whole thing.

We can probably make similar claims about love and relationships, health and beauty, intelligence, credential, and status within organizational or social hierarchies. All of these things, like money, have a slippery slope aspect to them: you can really fuck yourself over by caring about them too much, but you can also fuck yourself over by believing some zen bullshit mantra about how you can "transcend" them and they don't matter at all. Like most things, the answer is somewhere in the middle, and it's exceedingly hard to get it right, and it's different for every person, and no one has any magic answer for how it's going to work out for you or me or any other given person.

<comment><USER4> This response really resonates with me.

There's an experience I had several times when I was growing up and going through school, where I would ask someone for advice and they'd give me some well-reasoned, thoughtful answer, then the advice turned out to be unhelpful. This happened often when I talked to academic advisers. I realized afterwards that my academic advisers were giving me exactly the kind of advice that would have suited them when they were my age, and since I was a different person with different goals, a different background, and different circumstances, their advice was simply ill-suited.

The thing that really struck me, however, is the realization that they truly believed in the advice they gave me, and that they had grounds to believe in it. It wasn't "bad advice" per se, but they talked to hundreds of students every year and couldn't take the time to understand what my goals were. And I realized that I was going along a nontraditional path, I had nontraditional goals, I was deliberately nonconformist, and therefore academic advisers (as extremely conformist individuals, in general) were the least reliable source of advice for me.

I've started recognizing the pattern more and more. Someone will give advice, and they'll be earnest and honest, but it just doesn't apply to everybody. I had a teacher who thought "happiness" was a fool's dream. I met a recovered addict who had a sure-fire plan, with five steps, to beat addiction and improve your life. He wanted to tell everyone that MDMA would ruin your chances for ever living a happy life. I met a divorcé with some advice which women to avoid, or how to treat them. It was advice that he needed, years ago, but I didn't. Same thing over and over again, people claiming to know what would make other people happy. (Or replace "happy" with adjective of your choice.)

And I suppose I am repeating the pattern, right here. "You have to learn to recognize what advice applies to you and what advice doesn't, because you're smart, and there are a great many mistakes you won't make, even though there are many you will."

But that's the advice that I needed, fifteen years ago, it's not the advice you need. And maybe this story won't resonate with you at all, because you thought it was obvious all along. That's the lesson.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is a fundamental property of capitalism. People who are happy and taken care of don't need to spend money and are terrible for the economy. If you can create problems for someone, you can market solutions to them. Some of the best selling products in the world, like Coca-Cola, are themselves creating the the problem they purport to solve.

For a century, companies have been pushing cultural changes that make it harder for us to take car of ourselves, privatizing public spaces for socialization, promoting nuclear families over extended families and neighborhoods, narrowing beauty standards, promoting exotic vacations and recreational activities, etc. This has fueled economic growth while making us generally more vulnerable. As the article describes, even if you have enough money to take care of your basic needs, you have a long distance to go to happiness.

On the tech side this is quite common too. I would put PowerPoint in this category, too. And most AAA video games.

The sooner we can get out of this "money is a proxy for everything because markets are perfect" nonsense the better.

<comment><USER6> I used to be a hardcore capitalist and would've launched into a rant at this kind of a post. I do disagree in a minor way though: I think Capitalism is fine and dandy, I think we've just gotten entirely too good at the emotional manipulative style of marketing products.

Awhile back I started reading a lot about what goes into the creation of a mainstream big brand product and it's fucking horrifying. Food for example should scare you to death, how thoroughly engineered it is to make you want to eat more of it and never feel full. I'm not even talking highly processed food, I'm talking ALL FUCKING FOOD does this. If it's ever been involved in a corporation at all, be it for packaging, growing, slaughtering, etc. I promise you it has been engineered to at least some degree, and probably to a large degree to be consumed as an addictive thing.

Then you go into just the regular advertising for electronics, cars, on and on and how they do just tons and tons of things in this little 30 second TV spot to make you want a thing. You can find BOOK length documents to read about how to engineer the perfect YouTube ad, we've already figured out how to entice people to things using a 10 second video that takes up 1/4 of the page.

I still believe capitalism is the best system, but we need to reign in our marketers across the board. Consumers need to be able to make rational decisions for Capitalism to truly work, and they can't do that when they're being barraged with manipulative messaging 14 hours a day.

<comment><USER7> While I don't necessarily disagree I have to point out that TFA isn't talking about the malaise of wanting more to consume. It's talking about much larger issues: people who are schizophrenic, or victims if physical abuse, or rape.

I don't see any marketers out there enticing more people into the arms of schizophrenia, food stamps, or prison sentences.

<comment><USER6> True enough, I got a little on a side tangent here. To be honest though I think this is a little more sad, only because no matter how good as a society we become we'll always have rapists and whatnot, but we've created an entire demographic group of people who can't stop consuming as a compulsion, who otherwise were it not for excessive exposure to marketing messages they don't understand, would just be (plus or minus) "normal" people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a great excerpt:

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

This is part of why I get enraged whenever somebody on Tumblr says "People in Group X need to realize they have it really good", or "You're a Group X member, so stop pretending like you have real problems." The town where I practice psychiatry is mostly white and mostly wealthy. That doesn't save it. And whenever some online thinkpiece writer laughs about how good people in Group X have it and how hilarious it is that they sometimes complain about their lives, it never fails that I have just gotten home from treating a member of Group X who attempted suicide.

<comment><USER8> I'm one of those people who say that almost all people in America have it really good, and everyone should stop complaining. I'm trying to understand why I'm wrong about the following:

\- Most people in America are struggling

\- Most people outside America are struggling much, much more, to a degree not fathomable by Americans.

\- Therefore, people in America should acknowledge they have it really good and stop complaining.

<comment><USER9> I haven't seen your logic nailed specifically as a logical fallacy [1][2], but there's something _similar_ to a logical fallacy involved in the type of argument you're making. Namely, that having it relatively good _globally_ should prevent someone from "complaining" (or seeking to improve their situation) _locally_.

[1] [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppealToWorseProb...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppealToWorseProblems) [2] [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=641605](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=641605)

<comment><USER8> Appreciate your citing this fallacy. We certainly can complain about problems that exist, regardless of their severity, perhaps because they affect us or people we care about.

But I think there is a real problem when worrying about one problem comes at the expense of caring about another more severe problem.

Contrived thought experiment: You have the magical power of either curing your own toothache, or curing the world of AIDS. You choose to cure your toothache because it affects you. I would argue you should have considered the alternative.

The problem is not that you can't care about problems that are less severe than others, but given finite availability of "care" in your own mind and in the world, it is better to direct our "care" to where it can have the biggest impact.

<comment><USER9> I see where you're going, but "magical powers" take this so far into the realm of hypothetical that I don't think we can use it as a basis for argument.

But let me allow it, and move it to the real of practicality. Based on the skills and resources I now have, the contribution I can now make with my skills and resources (the "magical powers" at my disposal) would only fractionally help cure AIDS. At best, I might be able to supply a certain number of people with life-extending HIV meds by contributing all my assets and future income.

And why AIDS versus a hundred other maladies where my entire wealth and income improves and extends lives? Or does balancing the ability to build capital effectively come into play? Would we be better off with the issues the Gates Foundation is tackling if Bill Gates had decided to spend all his time from 1975 forward working with an NGO trying to eradicate malaria and polio? Or getting in a position where he focused on first world problems so that he could address some global issues?

I appreciate your concern--but "care" isn't necessarily a point in time measurement or a zero sum game--it's possible to care about multiple things at once, and it's possible to care proportionately more as means allow. (And in many cases, it might be more efficient to do so.)

<comment><USER8> I think if you are able to generate a lot of capital you should focus on doing that, as Gates did, and then donate it all to where you believe it will do the most before or when you die. That's at least what I'm trying to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> To me, this psychiatrist sounds really depressed and like he may be feeling burnt out or isolated at his job. A theme in the two typical cases he cites is that he isn't actually dealing directly with a patient's problems; in both cases, he's a helpless witness to a serious injustice exacerbating those problems, and perhaps making his own efforts to assist the patient seem particularly futile. He seems to be focused on a globalized sense of precarious life, where almost everyone is nearly overwhelmed with problems, but doesn't go past caveat with respect to addressing any evidence against this (i.e. world not collapsing, psychological resiliency of most people). Struggling with these problems is probably affecting his ability to help others. He should find a good therapist and start working through some CBT exercises if he finds himself thinking like this on a routine basis.

Just my two cents based on long-term exposure to psychiatry and depression. I know these things might be really obvious to most people, but I figured they should be pointed out for the benefit of anyone to whom they aren't.

<comment><USER11> The name for this in the helping professions is "compassion fatigue", basically the only way out is to stop trying to help so many people for so many hours per week.

<comment><USER12> My father in law was a psychiatrist. The "types" described in the article are all too real.

He got attached to some of his patients, tried to help them outside his practice. A handful of these people became part of his (and now mine) family's social circle. A woman on SDI became a nanny, a former factory worker is now our handy-man, another guy he put up in an apartment he was rehabbing and still lives there. At some point, some dude lived in my in-laws basement (my wife just shrugged that off, it apparently happened every few years).

I cringe when I look back on how I thought about psychiatry earlier. I thought it was rich people just going to complain about how sad they felt instead of just sucking it up.

Life is a struggle, for everybody. We have no idea how bad it is indeed. And now, psychiatry to me seems like a terribly lonely profession.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Viktor Frankl wrote about understanding human suffering as the one constant in all our lives and the one thing that binds us all together:

"To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative."

It's a good exercise to enumerate and guess the dramatic maladies of most people around you, but even that belies the larger truth of all of our shared suffering. It's the human condition.

</comment><comment><USER14> On the "bad old days:"

I think it is important to ask ourselves which of the problems the author is talking about are uniquely "new." For example, PTSD has always been a thing, but our awareness of it has changed. In the past, people with PTSD weren't necessarily thought of as sick even if they were clearly unable to function.

A while ago, there would be no ailing grandma "type" as described in the article because whatever diseases they were seeing the doctor for would kill them too quickly. What I'm getting at is that the issues he discusses were just as relevant and prevalent in olden times, but in olden times you also had to worry about being hung for witchcraft or starving to death because food stamps weren't invented yet.

We have to remember that "most people today have it pretty good" is a comparative statement, and there were times when _everyone_ was a creationist.

<comment><USER15> I think you're missing the context in which "people have it pretty good" is said. It's not a statement made by itself out of nowhere, but as part of a moral judgment, to claim people today have right to complain about whatever suffering they are feeling. The author's counterpoint is that it still is pretty terrible even if yesterday was worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is well-written, and seems to touch on some vital part of our current cultural dilemma: when we finally manage to make freedom and relative prosperity available to almost everybody, how do we then handle that freedom and prosperity? How do we manage our time, when so much of it is our own, as compared to most people who came before us? What choices do we make, every day of our lives?

I'm no psychiatrist, but I see bad choices and unhappiness every day. I barely escaped that fate, myself, and it's an ongoing struggle, of course.

I always thought the admonition should have been rephrased: "With great freedom comes great responsibility." But that seems laughable in a world where so many people seem like confused children locked in a vicious cycle of desire and cheap gratification.

</comment><comment><USER17> John Watson; 3 November 1850 – 6 May 1907, a Scottish author and theologian: "Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

</comment><comment><USER18> I can notice at times how people refuse pessimism entirely, like it would be regarded as a bad thing, like it's a crack that triggers other bad things in your life. It's like the X stages of grief, but people are still in denial from the fact that things are not good.

Psychiatry is certainly a world I would like to hear more from, I love articles like that. Psychology and how minds work is really one science humans are not good enough at. I see a psychiatrist regularly, and I really wish this science could one day make bigger leaps.

</comment><comment><USER19> Excellent post, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER20> Wow, that's powerful. What I was left thinking the most: so how do I go about coming out of the "bubble"? How do I come to see what "normal people" are?

</comment><comment><USER21> > 3\. Or maybe many of the people I know are in fact this unhappy, but they > never tell anyone except their psychiatrist all of the pieces necessary to > put their life story together.

4\. Or maybe many of the people I know are in fact unhappy, but they never _explicitly_ tell anyone and I'm not noticing the other obvious signs because admitting the existence of such would reveal _my_ unhappiness and bring _me_ some questions I wouldn't want to answer.

</comment><comment><USER22> Welp, now I feel sad. But I think Scott makes a really good point in this post.

</comment><comment><USER23> But... from the same site, we have an article entitled "HOLOCAUST GOOD FOR YOU, RESEARCH FINDS, BUT FREQUENT TAUNTING CAUSES CANCER IN RATS", which includes this quote, that attempts to explain why holocaust survivors have on average longer lives:

"One possible explanation for these findings might be the "Posttraumatic Growth" phenomenon, according to which the traumatic, life-threatening experiences Holocaust survivors had to face, which engendered high levels of psychological distress, could have also served as potential stimuli for developing personal and inter-personal skills, gaining new insights and a deeper meaning to life."

So taking the 20% that receive food stamps, say, and dumping them wholesale into "really miserable people" category seems rather misguided.

<comment><USER24> I think an important difference between holocaust survivors and the people under discussion in this article is that the holocaust ended. One day the allied army showed up and the camps were shut down and the survivors were freed. Their lives immediately and dramatically improved. For most of the people mentions in this blog post there will be no such single & dramatic event.

<comment><USER9> While I don't think the comparison is perfect, Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" illustrates several examples of cognitive biases where the expected suffering based on "area under the curve" (e.g., duration of pain in an non-anesthetized colonoscopy, or pain in a cold water torture test) is greater than the actual reported pain, mostly because we tend to report based on the later feelings (liberation, easing of pain) rather than peak pain or the integral of total pain.

Perhaps another way of putting this is that confirmation of hope is a pretty powerful antidote to prior pain.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: CryptoPanic – News aggregator focused on cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> https://cryptopanic.com <comment><USER2> This incredibly useful. However i'm just a little skeptical about the impact on price and whether it can successfully push either negative or positive signals.

Great Job overall. I already posted the link in a few crypto telegram channels

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I agree, the impact by single news post to price is close to zero. However each news post gives positive or negative signal to whole blockchain industry or particular coin. So maybe I should rename it to just Positive / Negative signal. Instead of mentioning word "Price". What do you think? Maybe better suggestions? Thanks a lot for spreading the word!

<comment><USER2> Yeah, i think renaming it to Positive/Negative Signal should reduce some pressure. For you to optimally determine how the news really impacts on the price, you'd have to monitor several channels/chatgroups/reddit forums and feeds of several cryptogroups to see whether they are affected. Too much work, and i doubt even machine learning will be helpful in this scenario. Your current approach is fine. Keep up!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm a developer of CryptoPanic. It was getting more complicated for me to keep track of many reasons and indicators why prices are skyrocketing or falling, so as a developer I decided to solve my pain by creating an aggregator of all the news and letting users vote on wether the particular news are giving positive or negative signals. Many more features are on their way, but as "they" say - skip perfection and launch early :) Hope you find it useful too. Feedback and ideas would be much appreciated. Thank you.

<comment><USER3> How do you determine impact on price?

<comment><AUTHOR> These are user votes, to be honest, they're currently 95% mine :) since I just launched the project. But the goal of course is to raise an audience enough, so the votes are at least 10+/\- instead of just a few per post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very neat UI. How you calculate the "impact on price" is still not clear to me.

I wanted to build something like this, will keep coming back to check on updates.

Edit: just read your response on the other question. Do you imagine this process of figuring out the impact on price to be semi-manual or calculated in some way rather than being subjected to public opinion?

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought of that - calculate impact on price automatically, but then dropped the idea. I am not saying it is impossible, but there are just too many options. I think it is similar to trading bots - I have tried using bots for trading and there are so many times I wish bot sold or bought at particular point knowing what I know, etc. Another problem is multiple currencies, for example - when so many are predicting BTC/ETH flip. Some news may be positive for one currency and be negative for another. Which is why I decided that user votes should be best source once audience is big enough.</comment></comment>


Show HN: rqlite – the lightweight, distributed relational database - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rqlite <comment><USER2> I enjoyed reading your story about building a DBMS. In it, you mention the importance of performance. So, I'm curious as to why you chose 'go' versus 'C'. Was the choice of 'go' a convenience to get something done quicker, or no observable performance difference between 'go' and 'C' in a distributed environment, or some other reason? Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Because Go is my go-to language these days (no pun intended). I really enjoy writing in it, you can produce quality software, and - critically for this project - a high-quality implementation of the distributed consensus protocol at the center of rqlite was available in Go.

With Go I feel like I can get stuff done quicker than C, and still produce high-quality, performant, programs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Recent discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11187907](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11187907)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11576540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11576540)

</comment><comment><USER4> Soo how real is this database? Do we ever see this going production?</comment>


Ask HN: Need a co-founder  - <AUTHOR>

I am a founder of web startup (topic: web operation system in a cloud).
Have an 75% ready beta. And I need a co-founder to enter to YC.
Now it is a great technology and has to became a great business.
Whom I looking for:
- Change the world mantra in a heart guy)) - Passion, energy, ... - Age 20 - 24 - 28
- Skills: extrovert, business orientation, technical background or something economical (but mix is better), sense of design and taste, understanding technology and making money, mannagment skills
- very very big optimist
- leadership and charisma is welcome - Ready to take responsibility. - Great communication skills, and deals maker. - Ready to work a lot but have a lot of fun, and results that improve people life, making world better (bla ... bla ... bla ....), and become rich too. - As I am not from US it's would be better to be a US citizen (but not required ) - Very big experience in CS, engineering, business etc. is great but not required. - Ability to be full time  in a project from development - to - lunch - to - growing
If you are interested, don't be shy please comment or mail me email@example.com and we  would have a conversation (maybe text/video) on which we would find answers to a lot of questions. <comment><USER2> Good luck with finding someone! Not probably suitable for your case, but we are also on a somewhat similar quest. As a team, we are looking for a business co-founder with a great idea to start something new: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3174188></comment>


2015 Electronic Hardware Development and Manufacturing Trends - <AUTHOR> https://blog.octopart.com/archives/2015/05/2015-hardware-development-and-manufacturing-trends

<comment><USER2> Since HN started 8 years ago, the most interesting new projects have shifted from being mostly software to becoming more hardware. Now hardware and software is eating the world.</comment>


Ask HN: Which product would you like to see open sourced? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Geographic data, especially postal codes. In a lot (most?) countries the postal office is sponsored using tax payer money, but acts like a corporation, sells the data and adds various restrictions to the data. Newest example is Ireland where postcodes are about to get introduced: you can't get a full list of postcodes without paying.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google Translate.

</comment><comment><USER4> Facebook - that would be interesting...

<comment><USER3> That's just diaspora, or any of those open source apps that let you post/view feeds. Nothing interesting. Open source the graph search algorithm and perhaps..

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> All of IBM's Watson.</comment>


Tesla Model 3 spoofed off the highway - <AUTHOR> https://www.regulus.com/blog/tesla-model-3-spoofed-off-the-highway-regulus-researches-hack-navigation-system-causing-car-to-steer-off-road/ <comment><USER2> Misleading headline. They spoofed GPS and caused the car to _safely_ exit the highway at a different exit than planned. This is hardly an emergency. A human might easily make the same mistake if their GPS was spoofed.

I don't trust Autopilot myself, I've had too many phantom braking incidents. But GPS spoofing is not a good reason to criticize Autopilot.

<comment><USER3> You have to get pretty deep into the article to get to these two lines:

>Any product or service that uses the public GPS broadcast system can be affected by GPS spoofing... this research doesn't demonstrate any Tesla- specific vulnerabilities

>The effect of GPS spoofing on Tesla cars is minimal and does not pose a safety risk

It would of course be better if Tesla vehicles weren't vulnerable to this type of attack, but the headline and much of the article has potential to be very misleading to someone who doesn't completely understand what is going on here.

EDIT: I stand by the general point of this comment. However I did miss the context of the quotes I included here. See nirvdrum's comment and my reply.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure those two lines really support your conclusion. They may, but they're both taken from Tesla's response to a previous test performed with the Model S. If you read further on, the researchers take issue with Tesla's response, particularly the part about it not posing a safety risk:

> The fact that spoofing causes unforeseen results like unintentional > acceleration and deceleration, as we've shown, clearly demonstrates that > GNSS spoofing raises a safety issue that must be addressed

<comment><USER3> You are right that I was mistakenly quoting a quote. I was skimming the article and was thrown off by the inconsistent formatting. Some of the multi- paragraph quotes are indented to identify them as block quotes. The sections I was quoting from just had a quotation mark at the start then three paragraphs later another quotation mark to end the quote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For me, the most interesting part of this article was the casual mention of "the Black Sea spoofing attack of 2017". Apparently an unknown attacker pretty thoroughly messed up traffic in the area by making everyone's navigation systems think they were over a nearby airport. Given that we've had several major maritime collisions reach the news in the last year with no attacks involved at all, I could imagine dozens of deaths and potentially billions of dollars of damages if they'd done this in a major harbor or with hostile intent. Just spoof an oil tanker into the docks at Corpus Christi (edit: or mess with stationkeeping on an oil platform) and you'd have an impossible disaster on your hands.

[https://www.maritime-executive.com/editorials/mass-gps- spoof...](https://www.maritime-executive.com/editorials/mass-gps-spoofing- attack-in-black-sea)

[https://www.gpsworld.com/spoofing-in-the-black-sea-what- real...](https://www.gpsworld.com/spoofing-in-the-black-sea-what-really- happened/)

<comment><USER6> GPS is only a supplement for maritime collision / allision avoidance. All you actually need are: radar, eyes, horn, flags, lights, VHF radio, and charts. Of course GPS is certainly helpful as a backup and provides some protection against human error.

<comment><USER7> I don't believe all of those are strictly necessary.

Charts, sextant, and regular visual observations are all strictly necessary.

Some kind of semaphore would probably be handy too.

<comment><USER8> All you "need" are the stars and some way to track time (a basic implementation conveniently provided by the sun). Everything else just increases accuracy. ;)

<comment><USER9> There was an interesting youtube video a while back on the SR-71 that could navigate via the stars years and years ago.

Of course the SR-71 probably never had cloud cover problems. :)

edit: I think this one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj9UwKQKE3A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj9UwKQKE3A)

<comment><USER10> The SR-71 also had an excellent clock on board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of words here, but the video shows nothing besides the spoofed GPS location in the onboard screen. In particular, this is missing any kind of detail:

> Although the car was three miles away from the planned exit when the > spoofing attack began, the car reacted as if the exit was just 500 feet > away—abruptly slowing down, activating the right turn signal, and making a > sharp turn off the main road. The driver was not prepared for this turn and > by the time he regained manual control, it was too late to attempt to > maneuver back to the highway.

So they forced the car to take the wrong exit? They stated just before that physical navigation/driving has no dependency on GPS. That's a lot less dangerous than implied for "veering off road", but the description is too fuzzy to know what really happened, and gives the article a suspicious tone.

<comment><USER12> Almost like the authors of the article have a conflict of interest as they are actively trying to sell a product to "mitigate" these attacks.

In practice, I'm fairly certain that such an attack being highly illegal (which it already is) would be more than enough deterrent in 99.99% of cases, just as it is with people throwing rocks onto cars from bridges or shining lasers into driver's eyes.

<comment><USER13> > just as it is with people throwing rocks onto cars from bridges or shining > lasers into driver's eyes.

Both of which happen with alarming regularity.

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't qualify the frequency of either of those things as statistically "alarming". In relation to how many people drive, those occurrences are exceedingly rare.

<comment><USER13> Not rare enough that I've had _both_ happen to me.

<comment><USER12> That sucks. Anecdata is a funny thing.

I've driven hundreds of thousands of miles all over the country and never experienced either.

<comment><USER13> > I've driven hundreds of thousands of miles all over the country and never > experienced either.

Anecdata is a funny thing :)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=stenengooiers+viaduct](https://www.google.com/search?q=stenengooiers+viaduct)

NL is super small, quite dense and the media here tend to report these things widely so you get a lot of copycat stupidity on top of the first idiot. People have died here because of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Yonatan Zur, Regulus Cyber CEO and Co-Founder, emphasized this goes way > beyond Regulus Cyber and Tesla:

      "We designed a product to protect
      vehicles from GNSS spoofing because
      we believe it is a real threat.
      ..
      By reporting and sharing incidents
      such as this we can ensure the
      autonomous technology will be safe
      and trustworthy."

Regulus is reporting a host of vulnerabilities, and conveniently has already developed a product to "protect" against the problem (not necessarily solve it, no details are divulged in TFA).

Regulus could be a good actor, but there is no denying they have incentive to slant the research and findings in a way favorable to their bottom line - SALES.

I noticed a lot of fear statements in the article. Appealing to the emotion of fear is a classic, common sales tactic. Especially when it's difficult to precisely quantify the risks, likelihood, and full implications of the negative outcome.

Until the claims are replicated and verified by an independent third party, best to take this report with a grain of salt. Especially regarding the Regulus Product purporting to protect against GPS / GNSS spoofing.

\---

An interesting and relevant moral question is:

How many people are killed every day by human drivers? Would it be better if all motor vehicles switched to autonomous and the death by automobile accident rate drastically lowered, but was still greater than zero?

Even with exploits like this GPS attack, I suspect the death rate will probably be substantially lower than it is with humans at the helm. As another thread points out, human drivers can be blinded with maliciously operated lasers, yet such events remain rare.

<comment><USER15> I don't know why you are downvoted, you make very valid points.

This "report" was a very weird read for me.

There is a lot of vague information, it uses language like "mission critical", "high impact", .... It then mentions that the immediate driving decisions are not affected, the attack can affect high level routing decisions - like making the car turn off the highway.

Then it mentions all other car manufacturers as vulnerable, and indeed conveniently mentions it's product which will protect the car.

There are plenty of concerns one should have about self-driving cars, but this is blatant self-promotion and obviously a PR piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Providing internet is not the only reason SpaceX's StarLink [0] is a project ;p

Yes, GNSS spoofing is an industry wide vulnerability, and not to just cars. If I'm not mistaken, at least in the U.S., it is highly illegal?

[0]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_\(satellite_constellation\)))

<comment><USER17> Most things that can be described as "shenanigans over RF" are illegal, but they're difficult to trace. Sure, if you broadcast from your house 24/7, the FCC will eventually send their direction-finding vans to look for you. But actual attacks can be localized, low power, and short duration.

<comment><USER18> It's come to my mind that someone could easily cause a small panic transmitting a fake EAS broadcast about some disaster or attack over FM stations duting heavy traffic in a city. Never heard of anyone doing it though. In high school I did play a fake alert from youtube about incoming nukes through the aux-in of a portable radio and had someone believing it for a minute.

<comment><USER19> Next you will be shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre!

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a fair comparison, has anyone tried spoofing a car GPS with a human driver? If my satnav tried to tell me to exit off the highway (falsely) in 0.2 miles, you'd probably see me "signalling unnecessarily" and changing lanes at incorrect locations. After a while, I might distrust the GPS and attempt to navigate by using road signs instead (and a driverless car could also choose to disable GPS input in case of significant disagreement) but in both cases, a motivated attacker could probably convince the driver to navigate somewhere erroneous.

<comment><USER21> _has anyone tried spoofing a car GPS with a human driver_

In some of the more remote parts of America, GPS doesn't work very well, especially if you're near a military facility. (It's a pretty good indicator that you're near an "undeclared" military facility in the middle of nowhere.)

I can't count the number of times my GPS map has shown me driving through a lake, or over flying over a mountain.

<comment><USER22> >I can't count the number of times my GPS map has shown me driving through a lake, or over flying over a mountain.

That's odd because I can count the number of times it's happened to me. It's 0. This despite having actually _been in the military_. Civilian GPS receivers work fine these days, even on military installations.

>It's a pretty good indicator that you're near an "undeclared" military facility in the middle of nowhere.

What does that even mean? If it's really "undeclared" (I'm taking the scare quotes to imply "secret"), how would you actually be able to verify it?

<comment><USER21> _If it 's really "undeclared" (I'm taking the scare quotes to imply "secret"), how would you actually be able to verify it?_

Visually.

<comment><USER22> Really? There are a lot of secret military facilities near you that leave tanks or fighter planes lying around or what? For every military base I've ever encountered in my career, the fences with "US Property NO TRESPASSING" signs and giant signs out front warning that you're approaching a military installation were the identifying features. In other words, they were all very much declared. If you took all of the signage away, I think it would be extremely hard to definitively identify most military installations as such from outside the fence.

Could you give a link to one of these facilities on Google Maps or something? I'm honestly really curious to see what you're talking about.

<comment><USER23> The so called "Area 51" in Nevada has, according to what I've read, a large buffer zone such that guards will intercept you considerably before you get to the fence and signs.

I imagine there are other sites like that, where the boundaries are a little ambiguous.

<comment><USER22> Area 51 is a bit of a unique case in how incredibly mythologized it is. I've never been, so I can't speak from firsthand experience, but my understanding is that it's not so much that the boundary is ambiguous as that the people guarding the facility are sometimes overzealous. In any case, those guards, like the signs, are declaring the presence of a military facility. While the Air Force might prefer that no one really knows what they do there, there's no doubt that it's a military facility. It's a perfect example of why the phrase "undeclared military facility" doesn't make any sense at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can someone help me here? I'm scanning through this and... not really finding much meat. They used a deliberate radio attack to spoof GPS signals and change the car's idea about where it was in a fundamentally unrecoverable way, and it seems the only thing they got the car to do incorrectly was... take a wrong turn?

I mean, yeah. If you take away someone's maps and compass they might get lost. What am I missing?

<comment><USER25> Not just lost; you can make them drive exactly where you want them to go. As long as a human is behind the wheel this won't be terribly effective except as a disruptive tactic, but once there's nobody behind the wheel you could use this to hijack any autonomous car and make it drive where you want it to drive. This might be especially effective when using autonomous vehicles for long-range shipping, where you could force the truck to drive to a warehouse under your control where you can then steal its cargo.

<comment><USER24> To be fair, that's not at all what was demonstrated.

But... OK. If you can put a transmitter on top of a vehicle in motion you can take control and make it drive to your destination? How is that significantly more damaging or dangerous or "bad" than just grabbing it with a tow truck? Or hijacking it? Or just stealing the vehicle itself?

I mean... this just doesn't really seem like an indictment of autonomous driving to me. People were successfully stealing stuff out of horse drawn carriages (or hell, just stealing the horses) and we all seemed to survive just fine.

Seriously, this just doesn't seem like a doomsday kind of thing. Needs more spin.

<comment><USER25> Because this doesn't require putting a transmitter on top of the vehicle. As the article itself mentioned, this sort of GPS spoofing has already been demonstrated to be effective at range. For the purposes of Regulus's tests they didn't need to do it at range, mounting a transmitter on the top of the car was sufficient to demonstrate that an external spoof is possible

> _The spoofer can easily use an off the shelf high-gain directional antenna > to get a range of up to a mile. If they add an amplifier, a range of a few > miles is very much possible. It has already been proven that spoofing can > even occur across dozens of miles, for example in the Black Sea spoofing > attack in June 2017._

And literally nobody is saying this is a doomsday. What they are saying is that autonomous cars need to recognize this attack vector and take steps to combat it. The fact that stealing or hijacking vehicles has always been possible doesn't mean we need to deliberately turn a blind eye toward a new and potentially very effective attack against autonomous vehicles.

<comment><USER24> You can't drive ONE vehicle to steal it with a blanket attack, that's ridiculous. You'd have to know exactly where that vehicle is, with orientation and velocity, down to cm-scale precision. And while you could then steal that vehicle you'd disrupt all the activity around it, so I don't see it.

Like I said, needs more spin. This scenario doesn't really fly.

<comment><USER25> It sounds like you're saying the technology as it currently exists is as far as it will ever go and nobody will figure out how to refine this attack?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Although the car was three miles away from the planned exit when the > spoofing attack began, the car reacted as if the exit was just 500 feet > away—abruptly slowing down, activating the right turn signal, and making a > sharp turn off the main road.

Designer fail, why is navigation system explicitly trusting GPS signal while the car has multiple sources suitable for dead reckoning(1)? ABS sensors alone (distance) would tell you something was wrong (being teleported 2.5 miles forward), then you have accelerometers, compass, cameras supposedly able to recognize side roads. Tesla needs to work on their kalman filter implementation.

1) Etak [https://patents.justia.com/patent/5948043](https://patents.justia.com/patent/5948043) dead reckoning patents expired by now.

<comment><USER27> I think you're a bit mixed up.

The higher layer that manages strategy was tricked to make the lower layer safely exit at the wrong exit.

At least that's my reading of it.

<comment><USER28> I think 'rasz is suggesting that a well-designed higher layer should cross- check its various inputs before doing stupid things. If GPS says we moved but tire rotation says we didn't, well, maybe don't blindly trust the GPS?

<comment><USER26> Thats not even all that high level, as per Etak patent:

"Based on the previous position of the object, the GPS derived position, the velocity, the DOP(dilution of precision) and the continuity of satellites for which data is received, the system determines whether the GPS data is reliable."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I guess I'm an interesting blend of geek and luddite. I enjoy tinkering with computers immensely, but prefer to leave them in their place. I don't like carrying a phone, don't use social networks, don't play video-games, etc. As part of this perspective, I have an intense distrust of self-driving cars. There is a great deal of difference between digitizing analog devices (using new devices to fill old roles), and creating new roles for tech to fill. I'm just a little too wary when it comes to driving. I can't stand the idea of a car grabbing control from me and braking, though some people I know drive such cars and regard it as a feature.

I don't know if this comes because of a technical background or not. As I have learned more about software development, assembly, cybersecurity, etc. over the years, I have become more rather than less accepting of things like self- driving cars.

This applies to IoT as well. I will never, ever, _ever_ have one of those glorified wiretaps they call "voice assistants". What do they do, any way? I don't really care about being able to tell a speaker to order more laundry detergent. Nor do I want any of these goofy "smart" appliances - why do I care about my toaster sending me push notifications when my bread is done? Or mining bitcoin?

I guess I just felt like ranting. I hope one of you can convince me such a cynical outlook is wrong, as I get a bit sick of viewing new stuff with negativity.

</comment><comment><USER30> Don't see anywhere in the article that this was _responsibly_ disclosed to automakers. They're literally publishing how to kill people on the road for the sake of making a buck (company seems to peddling spoof resistant GNSS).

<comment><USER31> There's nothing to disclose. Tesla and everyone knows their system is vulnerable, and knows that the solution is that the driver of the car is responsible for driving the car, which prevents this attack from succeeding. Also it's not anymore dangerous than Google maps telling you to make a wrong turn or a map being out of date. Navigation is not a safety feature.

<comment><USER30> In the article it says that it makes the car drive recklessly, brake checks in the middle of the highway and zigzagging across lanes. I'm not sure how you can equate that to Google maps showing you an out of date map.

Also, even if this isn't new information, that doesn't excuse them from writing an article with dangerous information, I don't recall getting bomb making instructions in the New York Times...

<comment><USER32> Go to your local library and check out the "Anarchists Handbook^wCookbook" then. It's about as equally available as your average blog post.

<comment><USER33> > check out the "Anarchists Handbook"

Cookbook?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't get these fears about spoofing autonomous cars to crash. It's already incredibly easy to spoof a human driver off the highway -- just toss a cadaver or mannequin into the road from a bridge. It's dangerous, illegal, and criminal.

Spoofing autonomous cars with willful intent to injure the humans inside should be treated no differently.

<comment><USER35> Scale is everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A simpler spoof is to paint new lane markings that just turn off the road and into a field or a bridge pillar (And I genuinely think handling that should be part of safety testing for all cars with lane assist tech. Not because it's likely but because it's the worst case outcome of bad markings).

GPS can be wrong whether spoofed or not, and it should only make the car safely take the wrong exit in the worst case. It must be able to tell if the exit looks right and could reasonably represent the desired exit.

<comment><USER8> So spoof a fairly typical construction zone?

Lanes leading into barriers and whatnot is pretty typical.

<comment><USER37> AP definitely doesn't handle construction zones well. That's one of the main differences with human drivers is we look at more than just the road, we can see a construction zone a half mile ahead and read the signs that warn us when we get closer. We know the lanes are about to get messed up and we are ready for it. My wife's Tesla is surprised every time the lanes do something funny. We drove through a construction zone on the highway last weekend where they had shifted the road over and left the old lane lines on the road in addition to the new lines they had just painted, basically turning a 3 lane highway into 6 mini-lanes. The Tesla lost it's mind trying to figure out what to do and I had to take over. To a human it was pretty clear as the old lane lines were faded and the new ones were bright white. As humans the lanes are not our only point of reference, the lanes just keep the cars organized on the road. Until we have an autonomous system that can look beyond just the road and lanes and recognize the environment around the road I'm not sure we'll ever see fully autonomous driving.

<comment><USER38> A few years ago, I was driving home late at night on a wide interstate highway with a nearly-pristine blanket of snow that fully obscured all the lane lines. The plows had not reached that section of road yet and no one was ahead of me. So I made my own path. It was weird, but obviously safe to any human. I wonder what fully autonomous cars would do in those conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> _Although the car was three miles away from the planned exit when the spoofing attack began, the car reacted as if the exit was just 500 feet away—abruptly slowing down, activating the right turn signal, and making a sharp turn off the main road._

This could be used in an assassination. To prevent this, motorcades should use human drivers until self driving cars become smart enough to realize when they're being spoofed.

<comment><USER40> This is sarcasm, right? "Self-driving" cars can't handle normal road conditions in most of the world, the idea that anyone would replace drivers skilled in offensive/defensive driving under urban combat conditions with an autopilot system is patently laughable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I love all the comments here saying that the hack isn't a problem because the car didn't crash. That's a pretty low bar.

<comment><USER42> That's literally the best possible result though.

The only alternatives I can think of are using the military's encrypted gps, or tesla launching their own encrypted GPS satellite network. .. neither of which seem like realistic options.

If you have a way to navigate cars without GPS, you should probably contact Tesla so you can make millions of dollars.

<comment><USER41> The best result is to not claim to have an autopilot at all because they don't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I would hazard a guess that to provide some protection is that the system would would not permit real time update to existing road structure and using inertial guidance would rule out any change to its location that would be impossible to achieve within a set time.

So say you tell the car an exit it has been confirming for sometime is three miles, any change in that distance based on what the car knows it is doing should be enough to flag it and require intervention.

Granted a lot of the article is one sided but the cars need to be smart enough to know where they should be relative to where satellite places them especially when that information changes to quickly to be valid.

the problem of self driving is fascinating and it just goes to show there is always someone or something that will throw a wrench into the process

</comment><comment><USER44> > Even though this research doesn't demonstrate any Tesla-specific > vulnerabilities, that hasn't stopped us from taking steps to introduce > safeguards in the future which we believe will make our products more secure > against these kinds of attacks.

What would the solution to this be? Signing GPS signals?

<comment><USER45> Existing laws? Surely intentionally hacking a cars navigation system is a crime in most (all?) states. Analog would be that I can't go around laying nails and thumbtacks on the highway.

<comment><USER46> Many different methods of hacking are illegal, and yet they still occur. Nails and thumbtacks less frequently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> You can shoot a laser into the eyes of a human driver and cause it to veer off the road too. But that's illegal and immoral so most people don't do it.

All of these "attacks on self driving cars" are just different illegal things that a single person can do against a single car.

But it doesn't prove they're any less safe.

<comment><USER48> I don't know if you can legally buy dangerous lasers, but anybody can access code + laptops, right?

<comment><USER49> Literally anyone can buy a dangerous laser from China off ebay, alibaba, or other mostly legitimate ClearNet sites. They're not even expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Related recent research that handles decoy waypoints [1][2]. They use imitation learning for path planning directly from sensor data, instead of just using machine learning for perception, tracking, prediction and doing MPC/LQR for the planner. This allows inferring weird paths, _perhaps_ , like "run into this narrow pit stop" :)

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.06544](https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.06544)

[2] [https://sites.google.com/view/imitativeforecastingcontrol](https://sites.google.com/view/imitativeforecastingcontrol)

</comment><comment><USER51> There should be a lot of concern over stuff like this in the future when technology is expected to lead the way. Who pays the cost when something an accident caused by spoofing/etc happens? Who is in charge of checking the firmware/software to confirm what happened? What does the owner of the car do while there is an investigation (lease a car with insurance money?) How would the police find out the perpetrator? What if the perpetrator is out of their jurisdiction?

</comment><comment><USER52> Jammer – ADALAM PLUTO $150

Spoofer – Blade RF SDR $400

FCC violation – Priceless

If you're going to test RF spoofing please hardwire the transmitter to the receiver so nobody else is affected.

<comment><USER22> The FCC hands out a lot of violations in Israel, does it? Regardless, I've never heard of Regulus before but they seem to be a legitimate company, not just a bunch of people winging it. Presumably they know better than we do whether they're violating any laws or regulations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Could you spoof the car to exit and continue thinking you were still on a freeway? A car being spoofed into thinking it was still on a freeway, while driving on city streets, might not prioritize certain rules when it approaches an intersection.

<comment><USER54> There's two components in the system.

The first component is the autodrive which uses only visual sensors to stay in the lane, stay away from the car in front of you, and maintain speed.

The second component seems to be the routing which enabled the first component to use turn signals, and route with maps. This is the piece that uses gps.

Since their attack only affects the cars GPS it does not affect the car's driving style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I wonder if, as self driving technology becomes more prevalent and more of these "hacks" become dangerous, if some federal laws around spoofing cars and using objects to influence an autopilot system become major felonies.

<comment><USER31> Vandalism, murder, and hacking are already illegal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Related submission from yesterday notable for Tesla's snark [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227439](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20227439)

</comment><comment><USER57> Is there maybe a future possibility of an eventual replacement for GPS being cryptographically signed in some way, so that we can verify it came from the United States government or what-have-you?

<comment><USER58> It can be done, but is not as trivial as you might think. To start with, the actual bitrate of the data is quite low, and adding more bytes to send is not easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> is it worthwhile for big firms like Tesla that produce these critical software and hardware systems consider hiring independent groups to try and exploit these critical systems for previously unseen bugs before they go into production? outside observers never seem to hurt with these sort of things

</comment><comment><USER60> > Tesla emphasizes that "in both of these scenarios until truly driverless > cars are validated and approved by regulators, drivers are responsible for > and must remain ready to take manual control of their car at all times."

So, tesla/elon are officially thankful for regulation prevent themselves from screwing up worse than they are already?</comment>


Twitter Hires Pixar Financial Chief, Preps for More Profitability - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_hires_pixar_financial_chief_preps_for_prof.php <comment><USER2> _Last year, Twitter's search deals with Google and Microsoft made the company around $25 million - about $15 million from Google and $10 million from Microsoft. These two deals were enough to make the company profitable last year._

I assume this is more than just the firehose?

<comment><USER3> Pretty much just contracts for the firehouse. And the revenue was for a portion of 2009.

Anybody who was building something around Twitter, and was thinking they might open up the firehouse for free ... oops</comment></comment>


Text Editor Intervention - <AUTHOR> http://chipotle.tumblr.com/post/5207966724/text-editor-intervention? <comment><AUTHOR> Looking for my next editor is a famous time-waster for me. I need to print this out and hang it up right above my monitor!</comment>


Google Buys 1023 IBM Patents for Android Defense - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-14/google-purchases-1-023-patents-from-ibm-to-bolster-portfolio.html

<comment><USER2> The most surprising part of this is that they didn't spring for an extra patent.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always wondered why everyone puts so much emphasis on the number of patents a company has. Not all patents are created equal. It seems like it would be hard to accurately assess the value of thousands of patents in any reasonable length of time. Did Google research every one of these patents or just buy all of IBM's patents associated with the mobile industry?

</comment><comment><USER4> 2^10 - 1 patents by coincidence, or as it's a fun number?

<comment><USER5> Hard to believe they needed a set of patents that numbered exactly 1023. So they either bought too many, or not enough, and are playing with shareholders' money. Must be nice to have that much money to play games with.</comment></comment>