Ask HN: We are a startup looking for ideas. What should we do? - <AUTHOR> We are a bunch of guys who want to create some beautiful and usable software that helps people.
We need to know what people want. We could try brainstorming. But we think generating ideas by brainstorming is a bad idea. It's really just making guesses.
So, please give us ideas or tell us what you need as a user.
P.s. We made a small form (idea.diwank.name) for it but you could just comment here instead. <comment><USER2> So you're a startup with no product or idea? Stop calling yourself a startup then.

Find yourself something interesting to work on, that you like, do your homework. I see in your profile that you're an "Idea Architect", "thinker", "creator", well you really don't look like one of these with this message.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know why you made the harsh comment but it is unfair to judge people on the basis of a single post/comment.

I think maybe you miscomprehended the purpose of this post. So let me rephrase this: Please give me instances when you face problems in your everyday life. This can help us identify common trends in what people need.

Model answer: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250749

<comment><USER3> hey diwank,

I like the way you've responded to some of these comments. You're a class act.

Interesting blog too (the bootstrap frontpage confused me for a moment though). found the post about the conversation with your co-founder rather interesting. so I think i've had a peek at how you plan to generate ideas.

What I'm about to outline might seem obvious to you, though might seem blasphemous to lotsa folks out there. I'd like to outline the one thing (most) founders ignore during their idea process.

\-----

Given the inital variables:

\- no idea how much the idea would scale

\- market factors sketchy (platforms changing etc.)

\- wise to assume failure

\- chances of a pivot close to 99% for most startups these days. (yeah, they're all thinking it)

\- sticking with an idea is hard in the absence of positive traction

\-----

Imagine the 1-2% of your life that you're giving away. depending on how old you are, that might not seem like much.

As a startup founder here's a few things you could get out of the 1-2%:

(1) money (sustainable growth/revenue, acquired etc.)

(2) PR

(3) credentials

(4) connections

\-----

IMHO, younger founders who're thinking of startup life as a career (long haul), should work on maximizing (2), (3) and (4) primarily. There's a lot of perception hacks that can be applied to get ahead with those three.

Now, here's the ONE thing: I'd like to suggest that founders imagine the kinds of people they'd like to connect with during this span of time: women(yeah!), movie stars(?), other founders, journalists, scientists, atheists, social workers. Don't just think it though, get it down on paper, turn it into a goal of sorts: I must form connections with these people!

It's possible you wouldn't cross off that entire list with a single startup.

You'll have to imagine yourself answering the 'what do you do' question to these people. (maybe you'd have to do some research into what they might likely want to hear) Now, regardless of the traction you have (ideally > 0, for mental reasons), that fact that you're running a 'startup' can get you places these days.

Before I get carried away, answering 'what you do' can get you massively different reactions varying with the audience, locality etc.

we're usually just thinking about what investors want to put money into. so yeah, think about the money, what's trendy, but also the kinds of people you want to connect with OUTSIDE the startup community.

I think the above holds extreme importance, especially if you're going on an 'what would you like me to build for you' marathon.

Good luck. Looking forward to updates on your blog.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey there,

 _I like the way you've responded to some of these comments. You're a class act._

Thanks for the encouragement! (Really hard to come by these days.) :)

 _Interesting blog too (the bootstrap frontpage confused me for a moment though)._

I just stitched together the design in a hurry. Redesigning the blog is lower in my priority list right now. Expect an overhaul soon though.

 _found the post about the conversation with your co-founder rather interesting._

I'm glad you did. This is why I put it there in the first place. I thought people like you'd help me figure out if we're on the right track.

 _IMHO, younger founders who're thinking of startup life as a career (long haul), should work on maximizing (2), (3) and (4) primarily._

I totally agree. It is easy to take these things for granted. Especially the value of connections and the fact that you have to be constantly working to make new ones.

 _It's possible you wouldn't cross off that entire list with a single startup._

Like I said, I think connections are a perpetual work in progress. It's more than likely that we won't cross off even half of it.

 _Before I get carried away, answering 'what you do' can get you massively different reactions varying with the audience, locality etc._

Don't even get me started on that one! A few relatives of mine are actually horrified by the idea that I despise the idea of a regular job and would rather start my own thing. Sigh.

 _I think the above holds extreme importance, especially if you're going on an 'what would you like me to build for you' marathon._

Haha, exactly. In fact, the whole point of this (even-if-you-have-to-make-a- fool-out-of-yourself) exercise was to get two things into our heads:

\- Ideas are like girlfriends. Have fun with them but think twice before getting emotionally involved.

\- The hardest thing for startups (and for most things in life) is to be able to talk to people and successfully get your idea across. Practice it.

 _Good luck. Looking forward to updates on your blog._

Thank you. Trust me when I say that I have derived great value from your comment.

Take care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1) Payment receipts/tax software Here's a pain: If I own a small business, I need something where I can forward all my payment receipts (GitHub, Constant Contact, web hosting, etc), tag it, parse it and at the end of the month/year/tax season, see where my money went. Great for taxes too because I always end up having to go back and add it all up myself. I know Mint can do this but I don't need all that bank crawling nonsense, I just wanna forward receipts to an email address (maybe using a Google filter to automate the process), and be able to view the numbers in some concise dashboard. BTW, if someone knows of any solution out there I'm missing, let me know 'cause this is a pain of mine.

2) Image resizing as a service. It can be a small pain to resize images using ImageMagick (installing it can be a headache), or any third party solutions. If the price is affordable, I wouldn't mind paying for image resizing as a service, image overlaying, or watermarking as a service. Maybe make it a few cent per API call.

<comment><AUTHOR> Image resizing seems to be an easy-to-implement idea. App Engine + Stripe + A Good API can do the trick. Will get to work on it!

Receipt tagging is a different beast. The format is inconsistent, mining data would be difficult and I don't know if people would be willing to send potentially sensitive details of business transactions to anyone.

But I'm up for it given it has a substantial market. Any other takers?

<comment><USER5> When I worked on a custom CMS the killer feature (according to clients) was the ability to upload and resize images (which they can then insert to their text) in just a few seconds. If you make a service, with an API and wrappers/scripts for common CMSs I think you can get some money out of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Work in an industry, any industry, until you get a feel for how businesses currently operate in that space.

Find the things that are either repetitive or hard, or a different way of approaching the problems for these businesses.

Then you have your startup idea and know who your customers might be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. I'm trying to land myself an internship at some good corporation to get a taste of problems they face.

Though, I'm a little vary of companies with bad work environments lest I end up getting a net negative worth out of the whoe experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some sources of free ideas:

<http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html>

<http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>

<http://androidforums.com/application-requests/>

[http://www.judegomila.com/2012/01/challengeyourself- in-2012-...](http://www.judegomila.com/2012/01/challengeyourself- in-2012-ivelisted.html)

I think you're still going to be guessing though. It's good that you recognise that as you should then move to validate that guess work somehow. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for compiling this entire list in one place. Great inspiration. Handy as hell! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My advice? Attend some hack weekends, build lots of stuff, see what draws the eye in demos and decide if you're interested in something related. Rapid prototyping with a readymade set of alpha testers.

<comment><USER9> It may sound silly but there are no hack weekends happening around us (We're located in India.)

We had already been thinking about doing something like this. And we realized that if we made ideas inexpensive and quick to implement, it would make our life easier and our startup more viable (analogy: git branching.)

How would we do that? Select, prototype, distribute and collect feedback. Selection being the key here (no chicken/egg problems, no enterprise software.)

We hope to primarily use 'Show HN's to distribute them and gather alpha users.

Does this sound like a good idea? Should we go ahead?

<comment><USER10> Hey sitanshu, I'm from Bangalore and I'm always game for hacking events anytime. CIS, I know, would be happy to host hackdays in Bangalore.

<comment><USER9> Hey Akash, thanks for writing back. I'm from New Delhi. I'd love to take part in any hacking event. Please let me know if there's a good one being organized some time soon.

CIS? Center for Internet and Society? Has it held any hacking event recently?

My email id: email@example.com

<comment><USER10> Ya HasGeek conducts hacking events at CIS sometimes. HasGeek essentially works out of CIS. Every HasGeek event has a hackathon a week before the event in the same city as the event. So this sunday there was a JSFoo Hackathon in Chennai and coming sunday there's the JSFoo Chennai event.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This question just seems so wrong, don't try and create someone else's product. Think of something yourself, test if its viable and build it.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are not trying to create someone else's product. Basically, we are looking for what people need everyday. The problems they face and any existing solutions they use. So that we can look for patterns in users' needs and build something that adresses them.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Someone suggested the United Nations Millenium Development Goals to draw inspiration from. It is a good place to start with for startups looking for ideas. High time we started working on 'real' problems.

<http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/>

</comment><comment><USER12> I watch a movie. I see an actor wearing a nice watch, or using a nice pen.

I want to go to a website and search for $ACTOR_NAME and $MOVIE_NAME and get a list of watch models, or pen brands, or clothing manufacturers.

See, for example, people searching for the coat worn by Zooey Deschannel in "Yesman".

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice one!

In fact, why limit to just movies? You can take this idea and implement it everywhere. Associating and tagging real-life objects with entertainment and web media. You know, so you can facilitate searching real objects within virtual contexts.

Could be a mind blowing technology. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> not sure about the idea, but you can start with changing the name: diwank? unless you really mean it to be humorous in British English by saying you want to fix things that suck or something, I'd suggest changing it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha. It's just there for the time being. Actually that's my personal website. My name is Diwank Singh. ;)

Blag: blag.diwank.name

Poems: poet.diwank.name

Home Page: singh.diwank.name

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Go to Idea Overload - everything about ideas in one place (including finished business ideas)

<http://www.ideaoverload.com/>

</comment><comment><USER15> Here are some for inspiration: <http://swym.me></comment>


How to go freelance - <AUTHOR> https://www.superhi.com/blog/how-to-go-freelance <comment><USER2> I find that as a developer, freelance becomes extremely difficult to manage client expectations with cost. They always want all of the features, without breaking the bank. However, I could see if you take that leap, then there could be more time to manage that. I have yet to have the guts to take that leap.

<comment><USER3> Part of the job of being freelance is expectation management - most clients want everything on a plate but you have to make them prioritize if they're on a budget... what is necessary and what is a nice to have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm the writer of the article, I'll answer any questions you may have on here!</comment>


Uber CEO calls Saudi murder of Khashoggi "a mistake," scrambles to backtrack - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/uber-ceo-saudi-arabia-jamal-khashoggi-mistake-92865f2a-d97c-4d6a-b171-5e7c0a69e77a.html <comment><USER2> A prototype self-driving car runs over a person due to negligence on the part of the test operator who was supposed to prevent it and failures on the part of the team who created the vehicle.

It was not _negligence_ or _failures_ that sent killers to an embassy before Mr. Kashoggi was scheduled to arrive, strangled him, cut him up into pieces, sent out a body double as a distraction, disposed of the evidence, and lied about everything.

<comment><USER3> It reeks of "no real person involved." Just an inconvenient abstraction to them.

<comment><USER4> The NRPI expression is something I first heard about on the HBO show Succession. Does that phrase have a history of use before that show? If I google it, I only come up with hits for the tv show.

<comment><USER5> I hadn't heard NRPI until Succession but I've heard NHI for "No Human Involved" in the context of crimes committed against sex workers. The only thing that comes up on Wikipedia is the name of a CSI episode though so I'm not sure if it's a term that's actually used by police. I would hope not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, just to restate this conversation in a different way: the ceo of a major company would rather remind the world of the time their car _killed_ someone then condemn a murder by one of his investors.

Good on the journalist for asking tough questions and not letting him weasel out.

<comment><USER7> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

I feel that quote describes a lot of the current issues in Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER8> This definitely reminds me of the scene where Gavin gets pelted with a water ballon and storms into his office yelling "There was a time where guys like me could have guys like that killed! But, times have changed." And then turning to his lawyers, "unless..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At least this is in the article too:

After the interview aired, the Uber head tried to disassociate himself from it, saying he had misspoken. "I said something in the moment that I do not believe," Khosrowshahi said in a statement Monday. "When it comes to Jamal Khashoggi, his murder was reprehensible and should not be forgotten or excused."

<comment><USER10> > "I said something in the moment that I do not believe"

Sure he didn't. This is like a political version of Schrödinger's Douchebag.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMabpBvtXr4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMabpBvtXr4)

<comment><USER11> Not to gotcha this, but "I'm someone whose statements should not be taken to heart" is not a message I'd want to convey in an apology.

Then again, corporate communication is often a game of being as cynical as you can get away without getting arrested or having your business shut down, so maybe there's some meta-honesty here.

<comment><USER12> There's also Angelou's "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The initial shock from this statement is the downplaying of a deliberate decision to torture and murder a man as an 'accident'.

However, what I find more surprising is that he would associate the Uber incident with Khashoggi at all. Why would you want to tie together the thought of a brutal, politically motivated murder, to that of your self-driving car running someone over?

<comment><USER14> I think he thinks that Kashoggi's murder was something like a situation that had gotten out of hand, or that it was decided by some low rank official. Otherwise, as you say, it wouldn't make sense to compare it to an actual accident (however caused by reckless behaviour).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> To be honest this won't assure anyone. This is not a very politically savvy move, to quite understate it.

EDIT: to expound further, the CEO has to have caught wind that the company is facing an amount of criticism for the killing of the pedestrian. To use it to justify another, popularly condemned act requires a good lack of political sense.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not surprised ... Softbank funded companies seems to have a thing for appointing wackadoodle CEO's.

</comment><comment><USER17> Everyone giving this guy so much shit like they've never accidentally tortured someone to death and cut them up into little pieces. SMH.

</comment><comment><USER18> To all of you moralizing how could the Uber CEO say the wrong word about the horrific Kashoggi murder... look in the mirror for a second.

I find it weird that when it comes to Saudi Arabia the vast majority of Americans seem to only care about Kashoggi and when to comes to Libya Americans seem to care only about four Benghazi Embassy workers. It occupies 99% of the outrage space.

So much outrage and ink spilled, Benghazi Benghazi 24 hours a day for years, by Republicans because it made the "untouchable" Hillary Clinton lose a lot of political support.

Meanwhile, the Saudi coalition bombs Yemen relentlessly, creating arguably the worst humanitarian disaster of modern times, and we continue to sell them weapons.

Meanwhile Libya is a failed state, an embarassment to the International community, millions of people live in dangerous country overrun by gangs, because we invaded and removed the government and created a political vaccum.

But we care ONLY about four embassy workers and one person who isn't even a US citizen.

When a major stadium in Beirut was attacked by ISIS same day as the Paris attacks, countries around the world flew French flags but Lebanon was a footnote.

We certainly do seem to think of Arabs as "others" even if many of them are white like in Lebanon.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/middleeast/beirut-l...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/middleeast/beirut- lebanon-attacks-paris.amp.html)

Boko Haram is terrorizing Nigeria, but we don't talk much about it. People are fleeing a drought in Honduras. Right in our back yard, the Zetas and Sinaloa cartel have been beheading people and running entire cities for decades, but not getting nearly the coverage of ISIS. Instead many people just focus on how there is an "invasion" of refugees at the border and we need to declare a national emergency.

We need to start thinking of all humans as equally worthy of our compassion.

<comment><USER19> >"I find it weird that when it comes to Saudi Arabia the vast majority of Americans seem to only care about Kashoggi and when to comes to Libya Americans seem to care only about four Benghazi Embassy workers. It occupies 99% of the outrage space."

The majority of the Americans I know care about human rights, gender equality, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and democracy. The macabre and brazen murder of Kashoggi intersects with more than a couple of those concerns. The people responsible intersect with all of those concerns. There is not shortage or reason's to be outraged.

Your inclusion of Bhengazi here is truly absurd.

<comment><USER18> Nothing absurd about it. Benghazi is an even more egregious example of the phenomenon I mentioned.

The phenomenon is the amount of outrage at what happens to four Americans while at the same time hardly any coverage of the MILLIONS of non-Americans who have to live and face atrocities in the failed state of Libya we helped destroy. That's the phenomenon, Kashoggi is just another example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I understand the shock people feel at seeing Dara's dissembling answer, but the vast vast majority of Silicon Valley has done nothing to lessen its ties to Saudi money, and almost none of the major tech figures who feted Mohammed bin Salman on his US publicity tour -- Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel, or Reid Hoffman -- have said a word in protest of the Khashoggi assassination. Hopefully the furor around this video will encourage some intrepid journalist to ask them!

</comment><comment><USER21> I feel like I should stop working in tech and pursue a more profitable career as a common sense advisor to CEOs and Professional Athletes.

<comment><USER22> you might be surprised to find out their advisors are telling them to do this wacky stuff, to get press. (source: old friend works in Hollywood PR, its insane!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> But I am not sure this statement can be forgiven.

</comment><comment><USER24> Let's all act shocked!

1- Uber is funded in part by Saudis.

2- They don't consider jaywalkers in their autonomous driving software showing that human life is ... not important.

<comment><USER25> I think I read somewhere that the concept of jaywalking was invented by the automobile industry. Go back to 1850 and the idea that you can't just walk across the street would be seen as inane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Uh. That's terrifying either way the comparison goes.

</comment><comment><USER27> The headline should reflect that he has since acknowledged that this was a stupid thing to say and that he claims he does not believe it. It is telling to see the lengths to which one will go to please the Saudis. First you say something in public to show fealty to the authoritarian then you categorically retract the statement and apologize. Most people will never hear the retraction because most people won't read the article but those who do business with him will do so, allowing him to save face while losing some little-valued public dignity. The news media plays into this perfectly because they will twist the story to be as clickable as possible; he is not referred to by name but rather by position and his retraction is not in the headline because maximum outrage begets maximum clicks.

</comment><comment><USER28> Didn't SA just invest in Travis' new startup?

</comment><comment><USER29> Guy is just a typical CEO who says what he needs to inorder to please his current audience. It would have been better to make no comment as he really was stuck between a rock and a hard place if you only consider it from the perspective of his role.

<comment><USER12> It's it really about the comment. Sometimes the reality is so stark that merely asking the question is the whole point, and the answer doesn't matter at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Like the House of Saud can't prevent dissidents from being murdered by Saudi thugs, the House of Uber can't prevent pedestrians from being run over by Uber cars. They would prefer other outcomes but if somebody's in the way, mistakes are going to happen. Take note and step out of the way, little human.

The Saudi regime is legally executing people for "witchcraft" and other choice infractions. The extralegal murders only happen when the legal options are exhausted. I'm not sure where the parallel to Uber is there. Maybe the comparison was a mistaken one from the start?

</comment><comment><USER31> Saudi Arabia invested heavily in uber.

Just FYI.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, It's mentioned in the article

>Khosrowshahi's call for forgiveness of the Saudis, Uber's fifth largest investor, included a callous comparison to the company's missteps in the self- driving technology space where, in March 2018, one of its vehicles accidentally struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona.

<comment><USER33> > _Khosrowshahi's call for forgiveness of the Saudis_

The Saudis planned and carried out the brutal murder of minor dissident on foreign soil. Forgiveness? This is embarrassing. Where are the SV overlords, calling this out?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> As a non-native speaker, I'm confused and irritated that the word "compare" is used in the meaning "equate". In math, I can compare any scalar value to any other scalar value; what I can't do is equate them. Is it indeed used incorrectly in this context, or am I missing something?

<comment><USER35> In this case "compare" is used in a less formal way, basically "these things are in the same category".

If the speaker had said "those things can't be compared" that would mean one was so much worse than the other that they weren't even in the same category.

It's the same sense of the word you might use in the saying "you can't compare apples and oranges." The conditions that make an apple good are not the same as the conditions that make an orange good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There's something hilarious about every saudi/us story.

A son of a wealthy saudi family recruited a bunch of saudis to attack the the US, and suceeded(!) yet there's been no backlash on saudi arabia..

But hold on, Iran is financing Hezbollah in Lebanon, obviously US resources should focus on this!

</comment><comment><USER37> This seems like a really bad comparison. You could take it as Dara Khosrowshahi saying that über's self driving car program was created with the intention of killing people.

</comment><comment><USER38> Oh yeah, Saudi's brutally tortured and murdered Khashoggi, Uber's self-driving car ran over a woman, and I forgot to take out the trash this week on trash day. All mistakes, all equal. Are we going to hold this over their heads forever, it was /just a mistake/.... /s

"I didn't read the CIA report" well neither did I but from the coverage alone I would never call this a "mistake". Also they own 1/5th of your company, do some fucking research, if anything you should be more informed about this than the average American.

I'm getting rather sick of this bury-your-head-in-the-sand tatic more and more people are taking when it comes to reprehensible things. "I didn't read the CIA report", "I don't read his tweets", "I didn't read the muller report", "I didn't read the whistleblower report" \- IT'S YOUR GOD DAMN JOB, I don't know why we continue to allow ignorance of current events directly related to people's jobs to be a valid excuse.

<comment><USER39> Would you please not rant like this in HN comments? Venting indignation doesn't make this place better, and whatever substantive comment you have to make can be made in a way that adds information, not noise. When the froth rises all the way to allcaps, that's particularly a sign of the wrong thresholds being passed.

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

Also, please don't post the same comment twice: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21505062](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21505062). Duplication is a sure way to add noise not signal. (Also, when there are duplicate submissions, we'll probably merge them, in which case your comment will appear twice in the same thread or we have to make special effort to exempt it from merging, and also move any replies that it got so that the replying users aren't punished for your duplication.)

<comment><USER38> Feedback taken, I apologize and will refrain from ranting in the future. I was unaware of the merging of stories being a normal thing on HN as I regularly see multiple stories posted about the same topic (not same link). I posted on one story then went the the home page, saw it posted under a different link and copied my comment over as it appeared to be where more discussion was happening.

<comment><USER39> Thanks for replying so nicely!

Yes, we definitely don't merge all of them but we do get many:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20comments%20moved&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20merged&sort=byDate&type=comment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Not trying to troll or anything, but why does opinion of a business exec on what the Saudis did matter one way or the other?

<comment><USER41> It gives quite an insight into the ethics of big business, or lack thereof.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Its becoming blatently apparent that high tech is heavily tied to saudi interests which are (not so) secretely supporting radical sunni interests in the middle east starting with the arab spring and our state departments conflicted interest and collaboration with tech at that time. I would not be surprised if we found evidence that social media companies were involved in creating bots to fan those flames leading to the death of thousands.

<comment><USER12> I don't think "radical" or "Sunni" are the key features here. "Genocidal" and "oppressive" are.

<comment><USER42> I recognize the social need to project the avoidance of religious discrimination, but if the "genoicidal" and "oppresive" behaviors can be directly tied to radical religious motivations then the label is apt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> So what are you gonna do about it?

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." ― Edmund Burke

</comment><comment><USER44> Contrast this with the NBA or Blizzard Activition.

My guess is what the Uber CEO said will be buried pretty quickly.

</comment><comment><USER45> Unless he's saying a self-driving car death is as heinous as a political assassination...

</comment><comment><USER46> Well, at least he's now likely to get an OED entry under the examples for "Freudian slip."

</comment><comment><USER47> Does Lyft support and minimize the torture and murder of journalists who go to embassies to get marriage documents then chop up their bodies put the body parts in a suitcase and bury them in their backyard? All the while the fiance is waiting outside for her future husband to return?

</comment><comment><USER48> I think this statement is reprehensible, still is this post an HN material?

<comment><USER49> If HN is going to cover business articles then yes.

<comment><USER39> HN covers intellectually interesting articles: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Rage posts lead to rage threads. Those get many reflexive upvotes but tend not to be intellectually interesting. This thread is a case in point.

<comment><USER49> I thought it was intellectually interesting in that I wasn't at all expecting Khosrowshahi to say that. Then it seriously got me to rethink how deep KSA's talons are in Silicon Valley. I came up in the Sun Microsystems and Google generation of early profitability and fierce independence. This anti-unicorn era of unprofitability and obsequious dependence is disappointing. But if you are beholden to your funder then you are beholden to their politics. It really was the SV business angle I found interesting.

<comment><USER39> That's as strong a case as anyone could make and I appreciate it. Perhaps if you or someone had posted a full comment like that early in the thread, it could have taken an intellectually interesting direction—they are sensitive to initial conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> What all large companies does SA have a huge stake in?

Twitter, Uber...

</comment><comment><USER51> There's no such thing as bad publicity.

<comment><USER41> \-- the French aristocrats before the Revolution.

I'm not saying we're gonna see heads rolling anytime soon, just that people tend to forget until they don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I wish people would boycott Uber until he apologizes for putting money ahead of actual human life.

</comment><comment><USER53> career suicide for this guy. Good look with that IPO now dude.

</comment><comment><USER54> Here I go making mistakes again, murdering people left and right, i'm so clumsy, mondays right? \- Saudis probably

</comment><comment><USER55> From now on a particularly bad example of false equivalence will be known as a 'khosrowshahi'.

Neither of these were mistakes. The one was a premeditated murder, the other gross negligence.

<comment><USER12> Is it a false equivalence though? Both show an utter disregard for human life, unde the guise of "guy in charge says get the job done, and is indifferent to whether someone innocent gets killed". I'm sure MBS would have been happy if Jamaal Khashoggi would have survive but stopped criticizing the Saudi govt or whatever. But if the business and the people in it happen to kill someone, that's OK too.

From Uber CEO's perspective, this is about the amoral organization optimizing for profit, not about the specific people who did the torturing. Would it be mere negligence if the tortures were AI drones instead of people?

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> There were so many other things he could have said and not created this maelstrom – "Of course Mr. Khashoggi's murder was reprehensible and inexcusable, but we're told by the Crown Prince that it was a rogue operation, and we trust that's the case. If a member of our board were involved in this sort of heinous act, I would be asking for his or her resignation."

But he didn't, and squirmed with a few "well, you're obviously deeper in this than I am" indications that he wasn't well-prepared on this issue.

It's tough for a CEO to go from talking to the press about the tech behind their tech company to talking about everything else in the world – that's what the CEOs of conglomerates and oil companies spend decades of their career being groomed into. In this case, he's learning on the job, the hard way.

<comment><USER55> > but we're told by the Crown Prince that it was a rogue operation, and we > trust that's the case

We also believe in:

\- the tooth fairy

\- SantaClaus

And many other such examples besides. All that wriggling in order not to find a reason to resign and show some conscience. Either that or be blunt about it, what he _really_ should have said was:

"Yes, Khashoggi was murdered. My investors unfortunately are lying murderous scum but I still have a company to run."

<comment><USER51> Do you really think that's what he should have said? Because that sounds like a vastly dumber thing to say, even if it's "honest".

The "rogue operation" story is "good enough". It's plausible. That doesn't mean it's true of course. It doesn't have to be. Nobody has to _actually_ believe it. It's just good enough so that everyone involved can save the minimum amount of face required to move on.

The reason that the murder can be considered "a mistake" is that the fallout was far greater than estimated. Consider that the Saudis are killing political opponents all the time with very few issues.

It's probably the grandeur of the plot that made the difference here. If Khashoggi had just been shot in the streets by "unknown assailants" (Putin style), it wouldn't have been that big a deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Oof

</comment><comment><USER33> Silicon Valley is in bed with the Saudis, no surprise here. Meanwhile, the shrieks coming from California about Trump are deafening.

<comment><USER58> Not only Silicon Valley. I struggle to see the relation to the Trump administration here, but in any case they are deeply in the Saudis' pockets as well, same as with any other administration that came before. To paint the SA regime and the US leadership to be somehow in opposition to one another doesn't really make sense. The cold hard fact is that they need each other and act accordingly.

<comment><USER33> > _I struggle to see the relation to the Trump administration here_

SV CEOs and "personalities" refuse to sit on panels or visit the White House because they hate Trump and his administration. But they'll take money from Saudi Arabia. It's very hard to understand.

<comment><USER58> Thank you for clearing that up, I think I misunderstood your original comment to mean that the Saudis and the US administration are opposites.

I think you're right that there is some hypocrisy involved when CEOs publicly denounce unpopular politics only to support deplorable practices as soon as money is involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> OK Habibi Travis.

</comment><comment><USER60> Freudian slips have better be avoided. I would like to think he's not such a horrible person, though.

<comment><USER35> When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> How did the topic of Khashoggi even come up?

Pretty sure the reason he was killed was some internal Saudi stuff.

<comment><USER62> Pretty sure the atrocities in Myanmar, North Korea, and tsarist Russia we're also due to "internal stuff".</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How a Brazilian can get a internship in an american startup? - <AUTHOR>

I'm an undergraduate student of computer engineer, and would like to spend the first semester of 2013 working for a startup in the US.
What kind of Visa do I need to get? Do I need a job offer prior to going and look for a job? And, what skills do I have to have? <comment><USER2> you need a J-1 visa. In order to get the J-1 visa you need a sponsor and a job offer.

for the skills it depends what you're looking for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the answer!

A sponsor, financially speaking? Or can I pay for the expenses, and only ask for the job offer?

<comment><USER2> You can pay for the expenses but you still need a sponsor. It's kind of weird. You have to pass an interview with the sponsor and then they review your case and give you the files you need to get for the visa at the US embassy.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Rustastic SMTP – an SMTP server library written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/conradkleinespel/rustastic-smtp

<comment><USER2> It would be nice to be able to see the API without having to install Rust. A small example in the README would also help lazy people like me.

I really like the SMTP api provided by the Java library SubEthaSMTP, it makes writing simple SMTP services really easy. If you haven't seen it, I recommend having a look:

[https://code.google.com/p/subethasmtp/wiki/UsingSubEthaSMTP](https://code.google.com/p/subethasmtp/wiki/UsingSubEthaSMTP)

<comment><AUTHOR> There actually is an example in the README. However, since the library itself doesn't yet do a lot, the example is small.

Thanks for the link to SubEthaSMTP. Custom sender, recipient and message handlers are definitely on the roadmap. Connection limits and configuration of "all the things" are too, but I'm not too sure how to implement them yet. I'll have a look at SubEthaSMTP's source to see how it's done there.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> EHLO,

Author here. This library is in early development and there's a lot to be done. However, I'd love to hear what you think of it and how it can be improved.

QUIT.</comment>


The future's so bright, I gotta wear blinders - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughtype.com/?p=8557 <comment><USER3> From about 1900 to 1970, aviation was like that. Aircraft got bigger and went faster and flew higher. Everyone would have a flying car.

In the late 1960s, the Boeing 747 and the Boeing 737 flew. The Concorde was flying. The X-15 had flown. There were many experimental transonic aircraft. Men had landed on the moon, even.

Even the flying car looked close. There were lots of VTOL aircraft in the 1950s and 1960s. Small helicopters like the UH-1 were working well for the military.

Then, suddenly, it was over. The last 50 years of aviation have produced fewer innovations than any single decade in the previous 50 years. Versions of the B-737 and B-747 are still in production. The Concorde was retired and not replaced. As Scott Crossman, the test pilot, once said, everything that ever flew substantially faster than Mach 3 is now in a museum. No one has been beyond low earth orbit since the early 1970s. If you want to see the VTOLs of the 1950s and 1960s, they're in the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos. Aviation hit the limits of what you can do by burning fuel. In the early 1970s, the aerospace industry had huge layoffs as the space program wound down and not much was happening in aviation.

Computing may be there. Clock rates for mainstream CPUs have been in the 3-4 GHZ range for a decade now. That never happened before. We've hit fundamental limits. Atoms are too big. Line widths are measured in atom counts now. Electrons are too big. The number of electrons in a flash memory cell is in two digits. Photons are too big. Optical lithography has had to go to soft X-rays ("extreme ultraviolet") to get better resolution, using an insanely complicated technology that just barely works. Fabs cost way too much and there are fewer leading-edge ones. Moore's Law is over.

As with aircraft, computing may shift to doing slightly better within the limitations of the physics we've got. The happy time of better hardware every year is over.

<comment><USER4> > The last 50 years of aviation have produced fewer innovations than any > single decade in the previous 50 years.

This is just plain wrong. You could also say that there's been almost no innovation in cars since the Model T, after all a car like that is a much larger jump a horse drawn carriage than the jump from a Model T to a Tesla Model S.

The huge amount of innovation has been in the likes of reducing cost, increasing safety etc. Now everyone can fly, only the rich could fly in the 50s and 60s.

> Versions of the B-737 and B-747 are still flying

Just because it has the same model number doesn't mean it's the same plane. Here's a comment of mine on that when it was discussed a year ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15514161](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15514161)

<comment><USER5> Measuring innovation as a quantity seems virtually impossible. The form of the modern stove was more or less set in the early twentieth century. But I'm sure someone could find a way to show innovation has increased even here, in terms of numbers of transistors or something.

The form and function of planes and even automobiles has been more or less set for a while (self-driving cars would be a fundamental change on the other hand). The form and function of computers conceivably might wind-up being fairly fixed at some point in the future but I'm less certain here.

<comment><USER4> The form and function of Unix-based operating systems hasn't really changed much since the 70s, but even then the most significant investment in their development (Linux et al) has been in the last 20-30 years.

As a sibling comment pointed out[1] better than I could there's perception bias in thinking that just because something outwardly looks similar, that changing it hasn't been just as hard or harder than initially getting to that point from earlier technology that looked quite different.

It was much harder to go from a 737 in the 60s to a modern 787 in the 2010s, than from something like the Douglas DC-3 in the 30s to a 737 in the 60s, even though the 737 and 787 outwardly look about the same, and quite different from the DC-3.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18223205](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18223205)

<comment><USER5> _As a sibling comment pointed out... better than I could there 's perception bias in thinking that just because something outwardly looks similar, that changing it hasn't been just as hard or harder than initially getting to that point from earlier technology that looked quite different._

Sure, I think in general once the form and use of a given product or technology is _set_ , much more labor is going to be invested in perfecting and polishing it than was originally invested in creating it.

This is entirely logical - once X is perfected, we know X is going to sell (or be used) so money spent making the most desirable version of X is well-spent. Whereas if X is still in flux and you spend a lot of time and labor on small changes to X, you might find out some other version of X appears, making your investment nil.

Here, there's also the factor that the perfection and polishing of a given technology can mean that it stands in the way of changes that would otherwise improve things. And network effect increases this effect as well.

Edit: and remember, all this is talking about why _revolutionary_ changes to products and technologies stop.

<comment><USER4>
        > [...]why revolutionary changes to products
        > and technologies stop[...]

Yeah, but maybe we're just impressed by different things.

I'm more impressed by the number of air passengers carried yearly around the globe being equivalent to around 50% of the world population, v.s. around 8% in the 1970s[1].

I'm more impressed by aircraft being reliable enough that most modern twin- engine jets in service can get an ETOPS[2] rating. There's been an amazing growth in the amount of direct flights, both transoceanic and otherwise.

It's like how nothing fundamentally new really happened in E-Mail since the 1970s, but in terms of making it a useful consumer technology iteration was everything.

1\. [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.PSGR](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.PSGR)

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

<comment><USER6> > _I 'm more impressed by the number of air passengers carried yearly around > the globe being equivalent to around 50% of the world population, v.s. > around 8% in the 1970s[1]._

This sounds more like innovation in how to run an airline than technological innovation though.

<comment><USER4> No, it's mainly technological. Here you can see the breakdown of operating costs of different wide-body aircraft: [https://www.planestats.com/bhsw_2014sep](https://www.planestats.com/bhsw_2014sep)

As shown there majority of the cost is fuel, and as hcarvalhoalves's comment notes fuel economy has improved by 45% since the 60s.

Not having to operate a 4-engine jumbo jet for transatlantic flights or make multiple landings in Ireland/Iceland/Nova Scotia just to fly between Paris & New York is also a huge reduction in cost. That's what ETOPS in my comment is referring to. The operating of having more engines is also higher.

Flights that today cost $400 would cost something like $1000 today if it wasn't for these sorts of technological improvements, and $1000 flights would be $2500 etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > By perpetually refreshing the illusion that progress is just getting under > way, gadget worshippers like Kelly are able to wave away the problems that > progress is causing. Any ill effect can be explained, and dismissed, as just > a temporary bug in the system, which will soon be fixed by our benevolent > engineers.

These were the key sentences to me.

I agree that we can't put our head in the sand about the problems technology produce _today_. Part of those solutions will be technical, and part of those will be cultural. Technology is never operates in a vacuum.

Regarding the "we're at the beginning" argument... I think it depends on the time horizon, and if you're a futurist (like Wired tends to be) or if you're responsible for immediate technical/policy decisions. If you view the potential impact of technology over the next 200 to 300 years, then, yeah, we're beginning. If you want to clean up the mess we've made over the last 20 to 50 years, then, no, we're not at the beginning.

<comment><USER8> Well put. No matter where you stand, you're always at the beginning of the next x years and the end of the past x years at the same time. 'Technological development' didn't begin with computers and won't end there. Ethics should matter at every point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been around long enough that I'm realizing we're closer to the end than the beginning. The late 90s were so bright we had to wear shades - then the whole thing came crashing down and set progress back about a decade in the 2000s. Innovation happened by forcing us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, not by cultivating our potential.

Now here we are again, having caught up to where we were in 1999: VR and AI are taking off (it was 3D gaming and online support then), billions of dollars of VC money are being thrown at mundane ideas that a couple teenagers could pull off in their parents' basement (if they weren't stuck working 40 hours a week at call centers), and vacuous claims are made daily by people who won the internet lottery.

This is not the future we're looking for. Or is, when you think about it. The wool has been pulled over our eyes. The rat race has become a marathon, the fruits of our labors are no longer ours to utilize. AI (especially) will be used to maximize profits rather than free us from labor. And unfortunately I'm not seeing acknowledgements of how badly we've flown off the rails, especially at the highest levels of the tech industry.

My predictions: another crash around 2020, populist policies that do the opposite of what's needed (austerity, tax cuts for the wealthy, suppressing the Other, etc etc), little done to reduce consumption or help the environment as a percentage of GDP or even at a personal level, and a revolutionary reaction to all this in the form of protests and cooperatives that have too little capital to mount a meaningful resistance. Playing out over 1 or 2 more lost decades until the endgame in 2040 when corporations finish merging with AI and human beings have lost all autonomy.

Disclaimer: I may have been watching too much Mr. Robot and Handmaid's Tale..

<comment><USER10> > policies that do the opposite of what's needed...

The jury is definitely out if democracy can actually "do what's right" with regard to social issues, the environment, income inequality, etc. In fact it is mainly showing the opposite - that those with $ can buy elections using "weaponized" mis-information directly targeted at emotional humans using Facebook and then do whatever they want.

I am rooting for a real Mr. Robot to take down Facebook et al.

<comment><USER9> I'm concerned about democracy issues as well (tyranny of the majority, tragedy of the commons, etc) but can't endorse targeting an ever-present Evil Corp, whoever that might be in these times.

Plus I don't think it would work in the long run. I've been having a hard time lately coming to terms with the fact that there is no quick fix. There's probably not much that even Mark Zuckerberg could do at this point to take Facebook in a more equitable direction. It might require a leap of insight even greater than starting it in the first place.

All of the important positive changes in history happened through organizing. It's really up to the employees of Facebook to do their part every day to make things better. If the system doesn't allow that, then they need to work to change the system.

On a personal level, I'm going to vote and donate to positive causes. But I'm concerned that won't be enough to counter the decline in education and civics that I've witnessed over my lifetime. There are fundamentals that we could work on though. For example, the US was founded on public education. I'd ask anyone reading this to ask themselves why they might favor private education over public, and how that basic idea might lead to college that is more expensive, or dogma in our political discourse. Some ideals are timeless and needed now more than ever.

<comment><USER8> You raise an important point. Society is the sum of all our individual actions and relations. For societal change to happen, each and everyone has to change. I cannot expect a 20% increase in salary every couple of years for myself and at the same time blame society's demise on Zuckerberg, politicians, or the greedy, immoral bankers.

<comment><USER11> >I cannot expect a 20% increase in salary every couple of years for myself and at the same time blame society's demise on Zuckerberg, politicians, or the greedy, immoral bankers.

yes you can

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think one of the big mistakes that we make is to assume that our current/future was _destined_ to be what it is, and that an alternative, _any_ alternative, did not take place because it was "less efficient", "not as good", etc. This completely ignores the effects of chance and fashion.

The new series "Maniac" is a good example of this (forget the merits of the show, I'm just referring to the backdrop). It's set around the same time as today, but everyone is (still) using CRTs and older-style office equipment.

Also, we so desperately want the "future" to be different from "now", that we often latch on to novelty with both hands, simply to distinguish "our generation" from the prior one. In reality, things change, but not as much as we'd like to think that they do. It's one of the things that freaks me out so much as I get older: everything is pretty much the same as what it was when I was a kid. Yes, things are different, but they're not _that_ different.

<comment><USER13> I saw Maniac's setting as a conscious attempt to emulate the future as envisioned by Philip K Dick, but with modern twists. The idea that you'd get free services by allowing a person to sit next to you and make a sales pitch was especially poignant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was struck reading about the Amish and their relationship to technology. We tend to think of the Amish as hopelessly backwards, but every year they convene and discuss new technologies and which ones should be allowed. As you can imagine, the process is highly selective and considers the impact both individually and for the entire community.

Negative effects from modern advancements are so common and globally threatening that it is easy to see how the cultural obsession with "new" could be replaced with "stable" as we face more and more of the fallout from this mindset.

<comment><USER15> I will always recommend the 'Amish Hackers' article by Kevin Kelly [0] which describes the sophisticated relationship the Amish have with technology.

[0] [https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish- hackers-a/](https://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > For much of this year, I've been exploring the biases of digital media, > trying to trace the pressures that the media exert on us as individuals and > as a society. I'm far from done, but it's clear to me that the biases exist > and that at this point they have manifested themselves in unmistakable ways. > Not only are we well beyond the beginning, but we can see where we're > heading — and where we'll continue to head if we don't consciously adjust > our course.

Reminds me of a few lines I read months ago from Daniel Pinchbeck's _Breaking Open The Head_ : "In contemporary life we do whatever we can to deny intuition of the invisible realms. We clog up our senses with smog, jam our minds with media overload. We drown ourselves in alcohol or medicate ourselves into rigidly artificial states with antidepressants. Then we take pride in our cynicism and detachment. Perhaps we are terrified to discover that our "rationality" is itself a kind of faith, an artifice, that beneath it lies the vast territory of the unknown."

Further reading: [https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/manvotional- thoreau-...](https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/manvotional-thoreau-on- media-and-information-consumption/)

<comment> semi-extrinsic There are two kinds of people: those afraid of their own death, and those who desperately avoid thinking about their own death

<comment><USER17> Seems deeply cynical. Where is this coming from?

Death is the only certain part of life. Who can seriously fear it? It's the part that immediately precedes death that scares me.... if I were to get Alzheimers I would rather put a bullet in my head.

<comment> semi-extrinsic I agree there are things worse than death, such as Alzheimers.

But still, and this is just my own belief, I think anyone who has given the matter some thought and introspection, is afraid of the end of their own existence. There may come a time indeed when death is better than remaining alive, but that doesn't imply one has stopped fearing death.

<comment><USER18> I gave it some thought and introspection, and concluded there's no real "me" to have a finite existence to begin with. I'd rather not keel over tomorrow, given the choice, but I'd say I fall somewhere in the middle between "afraid" and "indifferent".

<comment><USER19> given there is no real "you" to begin with, who is it that falls somewhere in the middle between "afraid" and "indifferent"? :-)

I understand what you're referring to though, and assume that the very few that have actually fully realised this (and not just on an intellectual level) are not really bothered with death, and not due to lack of awareness of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Is there an overarching bias to the advance of communication systems? > Technology enthusiasts like Kelly would argue that there is — a bias toward > greater freedom, democracy, and social harmony

Technology itself has its advantages, but scrutiny is needed for how it is put to use by large corporations with lots of power. A healthy discussion needs to happen around the role of platforms which are gaining influence into people's emotional lives. But is that a technology thing or a business/ethics thing?

I used to love the communities on USENET; and many IRC channels still exhibit some of that vibe. Even web forums centered around special interests are great communication tools and (can) bring people together.

But building centralized communication tools (1:1 tools or group/tribe tools) around advertisement and making those the primary mode of communication for people is something new for society and I'm not sure this is for the best. The large companies that run them answer to shareholders and have fiduciary obligations to them. Instead of "provide a communication tool and monetize with ads, hoping they don't degrade the experience too much", they are doing what we expect of any large business: "maximize shareholder value and hope the communication tools don't cross too many ethics boundaries".

I work in technology and have greatly benefited from it. I also see positive and negative impacts around me. To me, the real question is whether technology is improving the lives of ALL people or just those like me who happen to have a vested interest in it.

<comment><USER12> Great post. My wife and I have conversations about this all of the time, especially the FB vs. good 'ole web forums discussion.

I think the issue with centralized communication tools is that we haven't figured out the "shame" thing yet. Or, perhaps, it isn't even _possible_ to scale up shaming. There's a lot of evidence that scaling up shaming simply results in its weaponization (the internet doesn't do nuance...). Watching Roseanne on Joe Rogan this week was simply heart-breaking. The speed with which her entire career and body of work was tossed in the garbage really makes me think that it _isn 't_ possible.

<comment><USER21> > The speed with which her entire career and body of work was tossed in the > garbage really makes me think that it isn't possible.

Are you saying it shouldn't have been thrown in the garbage? I don't pay much attention to the entertainment world, including that incident, but I just lookup up the tweet that triggered the whole thing. I can't think of any context in which I would have any desire to show any support at all for a person who would tweet such a thing. If you feel differently, could you expand a bit on why?

<comment><USER12> You can watch the Joe Rogan episode on YouTube to see her side of the story in its entirety.

But, regardless of what she gives as the reasons for this particular tweet: no, there is no way that someone should be judged entirely by the contents of a single tweet. A tweet is a very poor summary of one's character or who they really are, especially if the judgement of the author was impaired. Everything that I've seen indicates that Roseanne is actually _very_ liberal, has been for many years, and that she is in no way a racist person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Neomaniac don't understand that everything new is necessary unstable and opaque. Older systems, cultures, technolgies survived for a reason. By obsessing over the new and dismissing the old we are throwing away knowledge and learnings.

</comment><comment><USER23> Really I think the impact of technology with communication is twofold and contradictory - transparency and anonymity. It is highlighting all of the ugly truths we would rather ignore - including scarcity of critical thinking. Societal hypocrisies start to slowly fall apart - like expectations to be both social and "career friendly" or looking down on those we depend upon. Even the lies and manipulation are oddly transparent - there is nothing stopping anyone but time from making several accounts to promote absolute nonsense. As opposed to traditional sources which make claims to authenticity and can betray the trust. Lack of trust is a growing trend related to manipulators, not wanting to understand the uncomfortable and genuine untrustworthiness.

Like always we need to adapt to changes as a society for good or ill.

</comment><comment><USER24> _> In his books Empire and Communication (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951), the Canadian historian Harold Innis argued that all communication systems incorporate biases, which shape how people communicate and hence how they think_

it seems that there were many thinkers which have been ignored at this time. I'm currently reading Jaques Ellul who made very similar conclusions in 1954 in his (IMHO) monumental: "The Technological Society".

</comment><comment><USER25> Discourse around technology is interesting. I've been reading a lot of essays on technology, digital media, and the digital humanities over the past few weeks.

The upsides of the future seem to get perpetuated a lot more than the downsides. In one of the papers that's at the forefront of my mind, the New London Group's "Multiliteracies for a Digital Age" essay, they call out the good -- more collaboration, more opportunities for a utopia, etc. While they do mention downsides, they kind of get drowned out.

People want to be optimistic -- there's a bunch of core human ideals and one of them is that things will improve. As such, technological downsides and pitfalls either get called out and responded to by tin-foil-hat types, or just fall away until it's a bit too late (thinking randomly of Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" here...)

</comment><comment><USER26> There's this belief, very common on HN, in technology as the solution to any and all problems facing humanity. In a way, technology has become a religion - "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

Technology was in many ways _the_ force that shaped the last century - <USER2> changed warfare, transport, communications, agriculture, medicine. Technology promised us a future of unlimited growth, with ourselves as masters of the universe and of our destiny.

But by submitting ourselves to the cult of technology, we've removed ourselves from the world, and thus lost our connection to the world, with its myriad living creatures and endless mysteries. In building ourselves castles of concrete and steel and experiencing our consciousness through 5" screens, we have become isolated and desensitized.

It is deeply ironic that the age of ubiquitous communication is also the age of alienation. And it is deeply distressing that so much time and effort goes into developing and manufacturing space rockets, mobile phones, new cars, while so little is being done, it seems, about ensuring our future _on this planet_.

I have become convinced that for us to have a better future we actually need to give ourselves a break from technology, in absolutely _all_ facets of life: the food we eat, our personal health, the way we participate in our community and in political life, and our place in relation to this earth that is our home.

</comment><comment><USER27> I find this post to mainly explain a worldview in a very broad manner without getting into specifics.

I doubt it can lead to a constructive discussion. People that also have a worldview with a negative view of the effects of technology on society will mainly just agree in mostly broad ways.

People that have an opposing worldview will state their own beliefs, mostly in a broad way.

But because this is not a specific issue but rather a worldview, there is almost no possibility of constructive discussion where someone really gains insight or changes their mind. Everyone's already made up their mind on this broad aspect of their worldview. That's just the nature of beliefs.

Another aspect of this is that any perspective is largely about seeing farther and farther forward into the future. It is quite literally like looking into the distance. Since it is impossible to clearly see things that are far away, it is quite easy to have a disagreement about what's on the horizon or beyond in any particular direction.

But the landscape is so complex that blanket statements about good or bad in any direction have little utility. In my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER28> The effects we've observed so far of the wide-spread social media with regards to our social and political systems seems akin to a 5-yr old walking in on his parents having sex; old enough to be traumatized, but not old enough to successfully deal with it.

Jury's still out on the long-term consequences of this exposure. Suffice to say, it doesn't look particularly healthy.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's the paradox of the infinite horizon. Dictators in the past have justified genocide under the idea that the pain in the short term can yield infinite rewards by being the foundation to a utopia.

</comment><comment><USER30> I really don't get this piece. Improving machine connectivity and improving human communication are interrelated but mostly exclusive concepts. Of course there are major issues with the "improvements" to human communication (Facebook) notwithstanding actual improvements like Wikipedia. But that has little to do improvements made to machine connectivity.

The power of APIs to automate away the tedium of actually applying human- decided policy is barely realized. Too many services do not expose APIs; too much necessary tooling (monetization, security, documentation, publication, monitoring) is either proprietary, non-standard, poorly publicized, or too complex to easily apply. Too few regulators and legislators appreciate the potential to kickstart adoption by mandating adoption and standards publication in government services. Too few citizens are adequately educated in ways to take advantage of the relatively few APIs which are available.

The hardware race may be on its last legs, but claiming that we've exhausted what is possible with APIs is flat-out laughable and ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm really getting tired of people continually bashing Kevin Kelly. Kelly's book, New rules for the new economy, was what gave me the final push to quit my job and become a software entrepreneur. But he got few things wrong in that book and the criticism was so harsh he stopped writing books for a few years.

Kelly is a cheerleader. But he ties disparate threads together and gives you a mental model where he sees the future going. He's been far more right than wrong. But some people I guess are natural born pessimists.

George Gilder has a similar approach. Kelly wrote in Wired in a famous essay after the 2000 crash that the Internet was at the beginning of a 200 year boom and I believe that to be true.

</comment><comment><USER32> This bit from the article:

> Any ill effect can be explained, and dismissed, as just a temporary bug in > the system, which will soon be fixed by our benevolent engineers. (If you > look at Mark Zuckerberg's responses to Facebook's problems over the years, > you'll find that they are all variations on this theme.)

Seems unfair in light of this:

> Ezra Klein: That is one of the ways Facebook is different, but I can imagine > reading it both ways. On the one hand, your control of voting shares makes > you more insulated from short-term pressures of the market. On the other > hand, you have a lot more personal power. There's no quadrennial election > for CEO of Facebook. And that's a normal way that democratic governments > ensure accountability. Do you think that governance structure makes you, in > some cases, less accountable?

> Mark Zuckerberg: I certainly think that's a fair question. My goal here is > to create a governance structure around the content and the community that > reflects more what people in the community want than what short-term- > oriented shareholders might want. And if we do that well, then I think that > could really break ground on governance for an internet community. But if we > don't do it well, then I think we'll fail to handle a lot of the issues that > are coming up.

> Here are a few of the principles. One is transparency. Right now, I don't > think we are transparent enough around the prevalence of different issues on > the platform. We haven't done a good job of publishing and being transparent > about the prevalence of those kinds of issues, and the work that we're doing > and the trends of how we're driving those things down over time.

> A second is some sort of independent appeal process. Right now, if you post > something on Facebook and someone reports it and our community operations > and review team looks at it and decides that it needs to get taken down, > there's not really a way to appeal that. I think in any kind of good- > functioning democratic system, there needs to be a way to appeal. And I > think we can build that internally as a first step.

> But over the long term, what I'd really like to get to is an independent > appeal. So maybe folks at Facebook make the first decision based on the > community standards that are outlined, and then people can get a second > opinion. You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme > Court, that is made up of independent folks who don't work for Facebook, who > ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech > in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all > around the world.

[https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg- facebo...](https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook- interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge)

You might question whether Zuckerberg's suggestions are sincere or practical, but they certainly don't amount to dismissing the scope of the problem.

<comment><USER33> I don't think it's unfair at all. As I read it, Zuckerberg's response is exactly what Carr is talking about: It's a problem now, but it's fine because we are going to make Facebook so much better; it will be awesome. It will even have a Supreme Court! Facebook as it exists now is just the beginning.

<comment><USER32> The article is specifically saying that people with "Borg Complex" say that engineers and technology will solve all our problems. Zuckerberg is proposing something much different than that- his Supreme Court doesn't include Facebook employees. He's admitting that tech has not and cannot solve these problems. I think Zuckerberg's answer is as far from "Borg Complex" as it could possibly be, within the constraint that he'll never propose blowing up Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> People on social networks who talk about US politics, to a foreigner, are a complete shitshow. Like monkeys in a zoo hurling turds at each other. You just have to see the responses to any tweet by Trump or Clinton to see that. I wonder if this new or if this was always the level of politics debate.

<comment><USER35> There's always been a fringe of people willing to say horrid things but the scale of it is much larger today.

You must have missed out on Brexit, Marine Le Pen, and many other things if you think this is unique to the US.

<comment><USER36> The _reach_ is much larger today.

It used to be that the troll would be the loudmouth at the bar. He might get in a fight with someone else at the bar, or he might just annoy the other patrons, but it was a pretty small set of people.

Now the troll is saying the same things, but on Twitter, and the whole country can hear his trolling. He's no different, he just has a bigger reach.

<comment><USER37> Totally agree. I am always surprised how much attention a single person can get for saying something stupid. It would be much healthier if they just got ignored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> So...

If you haven't already read this: [https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count- zero](https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero).

So - the science tells us that plastic is killing us. The news stories say it's in our water supply and food. The keyboard you are typing on is probably made of plastic (mine is). And that's only one of the many things that is currently set to wipe out the human species due entirely to our own stupidity (climate change being another one, but AI/automation and it's affects on capitalism could be another).

In my own humble opinion, the human race was better off when were not so smart, although we may not have been so comfortable. If you have children that are under the age of 10 they'll probably be old enough to fight in the wars that are coming as a result of food shortages and mass migration that will probably happen in the future.

Think about that a minute. In all likelihood our children are going to fight and die because we are too short sighted to stop buying so much and throwing so much away. Humans are a disgusting species.

</comment><comment><USER39> Should I bother to read this article?

> utopians who believe that computer technology is an unstoppable force for > good and that anyone who resists or even looks critically at the expanding > hegemony of the digital is a benighted fool

This is such an absurdly straw-many straw man. Is the rest of the article just a takedown of this nonsense position? Or is there a good faith discussion of techno-optimism?

<comment><USER40> > This is such an absurdly straw-many straw man.

Never heard or Ray Kurzweil before? The article mentions a couple other techno-utopians.

<comment><USER39> Ray Kurzweil says anyone who looks critically at the expanding hegemony of the digital is a benighted fool?

<comment><USER41> That's a pretty good summary, yes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Database of Criminal Politicians? - <AUTHOR> Does anyone know of a database that contains criminal convictions of local, state, federal politicians? There is some text stuff on Wikipedia but I would like the ability to sort. <comment><USER2> The closest thing I can think of is that Utah has a database of a white-collar crime. Would love to see more systems like that.

</comment><comment><USER3> database on the amount of benzodiazepam medications prescribed with add medicines?</comment>


Apple Sidecar on Unsupported iPads and Macs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ben-z/free-sidecar <comment><USER2> Three weeks ago, I used this repo to activate Sidecar on my 2013 trashcan Mac Pro and 9.7" iPad Pro.

When activating some features of Sidecar, my Mac crashed without so much as a dialog box. After three such abrupt crashes, I reverted the framework file.

YMMV

<comment><USER3> Dev here. That sounds like step 8 wasn't completed without errors:

``` sudo codesign -f -s - /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/SidecarCore.framework/Versions/A/SidecarCore ```

A properly signed SidecarCore modified with free-sidecar shouldn't cause random crashes.

<comment><USER2> When I have the time I'll try again, paying special attention to the codesigning output.

I'll report my results here, unless replies are closed, in which case I'll comment in the repo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> IIRC there also used to be a com.apple.sidecar.display setting.

I expect the reason certain Mac and iPad models are blacklisted from Sidecar is that it was sluggish or glitchy running on them. Even on supported hardware, Sidecar is sluggish over Wi-Fi (though it works great over a wired USB-Lightning connection.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Sidecar would be a lot more interesting if you could use it without Catalina.

<comment><USER4> Hmm, if only macOS had a backports system so that the best features of new releases (Dark Mode, Sidecar) could be backported to older releases (High Sierra) and you wouldn't actually have to upgrade. ;)

I can't imagine Apple doing that ever, so I guess that's an advantage of various Linux distros that support backports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a blatant act of artificially making old hardware obsolete for no good reason other than force people to purchase new one. I wonder if there isn't a law against that, at least in the EU.

<comment><USER7> It's not making anything obsolete. Nobody is losing anything.

This is a new feature, which they have chosen to make available to recent hardware only.

I suppose you could argue whether the performance features of new devices is really necessary for this new feature to work well (and what does "work well" even mean - is occasional choppiness OK? How low does latency have to be?) but old devices are not losing anything because they never had this feature to begin with.

<comment><USER6> that's not how things work, apple products form an ecosystem, they work together : i buy an ipad pro, now i'd like to use the feature with my 2013 mbp. Oh, but i can't, because it's too old ( or is it ?)

Same thing with apple watch. i "had to" buy an iphone 6 at the time because my 4gs couldn't have the apple watch software installed.

<comment><USER8> > buy an iphone 6 at the time because my 4gs couldn't have the apple watch > software installed

Apple Watch supported iPhone 5 and higher. It's a limitation of the BLE stack on the iPhone 4S (the 4S has BLE, but there were issues with it).

<comment><USER6> I agree, it was just an example on how « adding something new » may cause existing hardware obsolete, if you look at it from an ecosystem pov.

<comment><USER9> They get accused of planned obsolescence either way.

Implement the feature on old hardware, but it's slow or crippled? Planned obsolescence. Don't implement the feature... planned obsolescence.

<comment><USER6> Well, the solution is easy : implement it everywhere the best you can, and make it optional so that you can disable it on slow hardware.

It's basically the way software updates has worked for ever. Only since apple ( because it controls both the hardware and software) do we see features not deployed on old hardware because it may eventually not give you the best experience.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


RCN is much more data efficient than traditional Deep Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://www.vicarious.com/2017/10/26/common-sense-cortex-and-captcha/ <comment><USER2> It seems that the primary contribution of this technique is that it uses specific assumptions supported by neuroscience research in order to allow for composability of learning and better generalization. By introducing these specific assumptions (e.g. contours define objects), they are able to reduce the complexity that the model has to learn and thereby reduce the amount of data that it needs.

Obviously, the question then becomes: what happens when you have visual situations that violate or come close to violating the assumptions made?

I'm not familiar enough with the specifics of RCNs to be able to answer this; maybe someone else can. Very interesting paper and approach regardless.

<comment><USER3> After six or seven click-throughs, I downloaded the PDF.

I haven't read it but skimming, I could see that there definitely were no formulas in it at all . Which sort of says, at best what it tells you is "we did this thing, which is kind of like X and kind of like Y with Z changes". Essentially, no way to reproduce or understand by itself. The first reference then had a link behind a paywall...

So despite lots of apparent explanation, it seems like what they're actually doing is essentially unspecified (at least to the interested layman). It seems like at best an expert in the field of "compositional models" could say what is happening.

Also, the paper is published under the heading of an AI firm Fremont, ca rather than folks in a university, with the many authors listed by initial and last name...

PDF for the curious:

[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/early/2017/10/26/s...](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/early/2017/10/26/science.aag2612.full.pdf)

Edit: tracked down that apparently has some "real" math. Whether is even what the OP is doing remains to be seen.

[https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/t.e.j.mensink/zsl2016/zslpubs/lake...](https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/t.e.j.mensink/zsl2016/zslpubs/lake15science.pdf)

<comment><USER4> 70 page supplementary material: [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2017/10/25/s...](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2017/10/25/science.aag2612.DC1/aag2612_George_SM.pdf)

Reference code: [https://github.com/vicariousinc/science_rcn](https://github.com/vicariousinc/science_rcn)

<comment><USER5> I still find it incredibly hard to tell whether this is overblown hype or legit scientific progress. There is no indication whatsoever that this approach scales to deep feature hierarchies and that is likely what you need to compete on hard tasks like classification on ImageNet. Given the amount of money at play (several hundred millions of dollars), writing 70 pages, making code publishable is certainly an obvious way to get the most out of the hype.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Again: no one cares about CAPTCHA in the deep learning world compared to other more challenging benchmarks. I wouldn't be surprised that many optimizations could be made with ANY kind of effort put into it. Still waiting for Vicarious to go beyond MNIST and text CPATCHA.

<comment><USER7> This is trueish, but there is more to it than that.

It is true for sure that absolute performance on MNIST isn't the most interesting thing in the world.

But when introducing a new tool or technique being able to show competitive performance on MNIST is a good way to show that it isn't an entirely useless thing.

I'd note that recent Sabour, Frosst and Hinton paper[1] (where they finally got Hinton's capsules to work) spends most of the paper analyzing how it performs on MNIST, and only a short section on other datasets.

I assume I don't need to point out that Geoff Hinton does know a little about deep learning, and if he thinks submitting a NIPS paper on MNIST is acceptable in 2017 then I'm not going to argue too hard against it.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.09829.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.09829.pdf)

<comment><USER8> And what about the other _boys_ who know a thing or two about deep learning? I don't see any of these people submitting MNIST to NIPS in 2017: Yousha Bengio, Yann LeCun, Ian Goodfellow, Andrew Ng, Ross Girshick, Andrej Karpathy, Pedro Domingos, and the whole DeepMind crew.

So yes, submitting experiments on MNIST in 2017 should not be taken seriously.

<comment><USER7> "boys"

Not sure what this was supposed to mean? Yes, I think Fei Fei Li's datasets are much better tests than MNIST if that is what you were getting at?

 _I don 't see any of these people submitting MNIST to NIPS in 2017_

None of them submitted things as entirely new and different as this, either.

Having said that, I think my point holds.

The completely awesome 2017 "Generalization in Deep Learning" paper[1] was co- authored by Bengio and uses MNIST - because everyone can follow it.

Yann LeCun was co-author on the 2017 "Adversarially Regularized Autoencoders for Generating Discrete Structures"[1.5], using MNIST

Ian Goodfellow Autoencoder NIPS paper[1] used MNIST as one of its 4 datasets. Yes, it was 2014, but when introducing a new technique using familiar datasets isn't a bad thing.

DeepMind's "Bayes by Backprop" (ICML15) used MNIST[2]

Another example: the (June 2017) John Langford (Vowpal Wabbit) et. al paper[3] on using Boosting to learn ResNet blocks used MNIST.

So yes, I agree there are much better datasets to compare performance on. But to prove something new works, MNIST is a useful dataset.

[0] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.05468.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.05468.pdf)

[1] [http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial- nets](http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial-nets)

[1.5] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.04223.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.04223.pdf)

[2] [https://deepmind.com/research/publications/weight- uncertaint...](https://deepmind.com/research/publications/weight-uncertainty- neural-networks/)

[3] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.04964.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.04964.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I only skimmed over the article, but I think the title on HN does not reflect the claims the authors are making.

The title of the paper is: A generative vision model that trains with high data efficiency and breaks text-based CAPTCHAs

The title of the article is: Common Sense, Cortex, and CAPTCHA

That's nowhere near the sensationalist title at HN: RCN is much more data efficient than traditional Deep Neural Networks

<comment><USER4> Paper abstract highlights the model's data efficiency several times:

 _Learning from few examples and generalizing to dramatically different situations are capabilities of human visual intelligence that are yet to be matched by leading machine learning models. By drawing inspiration from systems neuroscience, we introduce a probabilistic generative model for vision in which message-passing based inference handles recognition, segmentation and reasoning in a unified way. The model demonstrates excellent generalization and occlusion-reasoning capabilities, and outperforms deep neural networks on a challenging scene text recognition benchmark while being 300-fold more data efficient. In addition, the model fundamentally breaks the defense of modern text-based CAPTCHAs by generatively segmenting characters without CAPTCHA- specific heuristics. Our model emphasizes aspects like data efficiency and compositionality that may be important in the path toward general artificial intelligence._

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As far as I can tell, the code on GitHub ([https://github.com/vicariousinc/science_rcn](https://github.com/vicariousinc/science_rcn)) only works for the MNIST dataset.

Unclear how to run on the CAPTCHA examples referenced in the paper, even though they did make the datasets for those examples available.

Bummer, a big part of what the paper mentions about being so great with this RCN model is being able to segment sequences of characters (of indeterminate length even!). Sad that I cannot easily verify this for myself!

<comment><USER11> We talked about releasing more comprehensive proof of concept code, but ultimately decided against it. While helpful for other researchers, offering anyone on the internet a ready-to-use arbitrary captcha breaker seemed like a net-negative for society.

<comment><USER12> Like people can't find captcha breakers already. Your research might push for the replacement of text captchas with some other test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd love to read this, but the faint text on white background... good god. I went through the code looking to change the background so I could read it and found this:

body { text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; }

Ok

<comment><USER14> Huh. Did they change it? I see a very thin font in the header and in bulleted lists, but the rest of the text on the page is black (literally #000000) and relatively bold compared to what I'm used to seeing online (could just be that it's slightly larger, which is also good! it's by no means _big_ , just nice to see something not pointlessly tiny).

The header has the awful "ObjektivMk1-Thin" font mentioned elsewhere, but for me the body is a normal _" Roboto","Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans- serif_ font-family.

<comment><USER15> They did change it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Featuring some of the worst typography I've seen on the internet. There clearly was an attempt, but just leaving font-face as default would've been more readable.

<comment><USER17> I'll typically be the last to comment on a webpage typography (usually to a fault) but this site here actually gives me a headache to try and read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This paper looks really interesting to me, although after quickly reading the introduction it's evident that I'm going to have to invest quite a bit of time and effort on the paper to grasp its key ideas. I come from more an encoding- decoding, deep/machine-learning background, as opposed to a probabilistic graphical modeling or PGM background, and my knowledge of neuroscience is minimal.

To date, my experience with "deep PGM models" (for lack of a better term) is limited to some tinkering with (a) variational autoencoders using ELBO maximization as the training objective, and to a much lesser extent (b) "bi- directional" GANs using a Jensen-Shannon divergence between two joint distributions as the training loss.

Has anyone here with a similar background to mine had a chance to read this paper? Any thoughts?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm reading over and over again since the last weekend. And I'm checking the code. And I'm still not understanding it.

</comment></comment><comment> real-hacker It looks RCN sits between traditional machine learning (with manual feature selection) and 'modern' neural networks (CNN). The traditional methods are too rigid to capture the essential information, while the CNNs sometimes are too flexible to avoid overfitting. Different from CNNS, RCNs have a predetermined structure. Humans are not born a blank slate, we have a neural structure encoded in our genes, so we don't need millions of training samples to recognize objects. So maybe RCN is onto something.

I am curious how RCN performs on real-life images like ImageNet, and how do they perform against adversarial examples. If they can easily recognize adversarial examples, that would be very interesting...

</comment><comment><USER19> > In 2013, we announced an early success of RCN: its ability to break text- > based CAPTCHAs like those illustrated below (left column). With one model, > we achieve an accuracy rate of 66.6% on reCAPTCHAs, 64.4% on BotDetect, > 57.4% on Yahoo, and 57.1% on PayPal, all significantly above the 1% rate at > which CAPTCHAs are considered ineffective (see [4] for more details). When > we optimize a single model for a specific style, we can achieve up to 90% > accuracy.

66% with reCaptcha and up to 90% when optimised is much higher than what I can achieve with my actual brain. Maybe I should consider using a neural network to answer those, it happens quite frequently that I need 2-3 rounds to get through reCaptcha.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is RCN more of a CNN alternative most useful to image-related tasks or could also work well to other types of neural networks?

ps: thanks god for Reader mode on Safari

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a paper that departs from the 'normal' AI routine and takes a very different approach. Is there another paper formally describing the RCN network? What goes inside the RCN cell? I find it more like a teaser than a revelation at this point.

<comment><USER2> The details are provided in the supplementary material: [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2017/10/25/s...](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2017/10/25/science.aag2612.DC1/aag2612_George_SM.pdf)

(mentioned by boltzmannbrain in one of the other comments)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I do not see a discussion in the paper regarding computational efficiency of RCN detection. The only hint about performance that I found is at the end of supplementary material where the authors state:

> Use of appearance during the forward pass: Surface appearance is now only > used after the backward pass. This means that appearance information > (including textures) is not being used during the forward pass to improve > detection (whereas CNNs do). Propagating appearance bottom-up is a requisite > for high performance on appearance-rich images.

I presume from this that in the current form RCN requires much more computations than CNN per detection, but I could be wrong.

</comment><comment><USER22> If I'm not mistaken, a Deep Belief Net or Deep Belief Machine would also be a generative model with enormously greater data efficiency. Comparing against CNNs is a red herring: the advantage of requiring less data to develop a model is more a generative/discriminative issue than it is an "RCN vs everyone else" issue.

What I don't quite understand is why Deep Belief Nets seem to not be getting press these days. For example, see this paper from 2010: [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v9/salakhutdinov10a.html](http://proceedings.mlr.press/v9/salakhutdinov10a.html).

</comment><comment><USER23> Here's another example of a generative model that improves data efficiency, in a similar-ish domain.

[https://gizmodo.com/a-new-ai-system-passed-a-visual- turing-t...](https://gizmodo.com/a-new-ai-system-passed-a-visual-turing- test-1747500554) / [http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/Papers/Science-2015-Lake-1332-8.p...](http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/Papers/Science-2015-Lake-1332-8.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER24> Recent discussion on Vicarious' CAPTCHA cracking: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15564922](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15564922)

</comment><comment><USER25> The git 'reference implementation' is only for MNIST not for real captchas.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'll need to see this approach work well across many datasets before I am convinced, not just captchas and the MNIST

</comment><comment><USER27> How hard is it to get it to run using CoreML?</comment>


DigitalOcean vs. Linode (Comparison) in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://rehmat.works/digitalocean-vs-linode-in-2018/ <comment><USER2> I guess this comparison was a bit too early as DigitalOcean just revamped it's packages.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been a long time fan of Linode.

Digital Ocean is trying to move up the stack to compete with AWS, but they still have a long way to go.

I am wondering if anybody is actually using their cloud-like features?</comment>


Explained: The MySQL query that powers Correlated - <AUTHOR> http://coding.pressbin.com/88/How-my-new-site-Correlated-works/

<comment><USER2> The background of the correlated website (<http://www.correlated.org/>) just gave me a seizure. I wonder how many people that had seizures also like sushi.

</comment><comment><USER3> You should use bind variables instead of directly inserting php variables in your SQL. You're just opening yourself up for SQL injection. >> WHERE poll_id != '$poll_id'

<comment><AUTHOR> The post explicitly notes that the query, as presented, is not necessarily secure and is merely meant to give the reader the gist of what's going on.

However, in Correlated's case, it's not really an issue, because SQL injection is only a problem when $poll_id is a user input. But this particular query is only run by a user-inaccessible script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looking at that SQL reminds me how much better Oracle & MS SQL Server are at doing queries like that (thanks to analytic functions). You could get that table access down to 1 single index scan, instead of 4+.

MySQL and Postgres are fine at OLTP but when you get into analytics and reporting, they really show their lack of features.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice! I'm not really digging the design (I'm not a neon color person), but really cool info.

I didn't sign up though because I wanted to login with Twitter. I don't like creating a million accounts and connecting to twitter would allow you a social promotion bonus.</comment>