What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html <comment><USER2> Threads from back then: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=What%20Google%20Learned%20From...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=What%20Google%20Learned%20From%20Its%20Quest%20to%20Build%20the%20Perfect%20Team%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

</comment><comment><USER3> Best. Link. On. Hacker News. Ever.

Favorited.</comment>


Project Tango - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/ <comment><USER2> This is essentially putting a Kinect in your phone and hooking it up with hopefully high-level APIs. It may take 2-3 years to make it into regular phones, but when it does it will be huge. Apple's acquisition of PrimeSense (the makers of the 1st gen Kinect) means they're also working on this.

To give you a real-world example: when I started BarSsense ([http://www.barsense.com](http://www.barsense.com)) the core problem was tracking the path and velocity of a weightlifter's bar. I bought a PrimeSense camera because it can extract a lot more data and with greater accuracy out of an image than a regular camera. After some prototyping, I decided to use a 2D camera and deliver the software as an app because I thought wide distribution and ease of use was more important than the fidelity and correctness of the data - ie, the "worse is better" approach. When these cameras make their way into regular phones, "worse is better" will suddenly become "better".

<comment><USER3> I don't understand the application beyond gaming. The other applications discussed are basically shopping.

Essentially this would make it much easier to represent the physical world digitally. But what use cases does a consumer or the average phone user have for digital representations of the physical space around them, particularly given that the user is already aware of the the physical space around them? How can this sort of digital device extend our ability to interact with physical space?

<comment><USER4> * Mapping the physical world

Ever wanted a floor plan for your home? Just wave your phone around.

* Visual annotation

Add direction overlays, see the plan for a play your team is executing on the helmet HUD, highlight "dangerous"(weaving, too fast, whatnot) drivers on the car HUD.

* Integrate sensor data to extend human perception

Add an IR overlay. Sample sound across the room, do a volumetric display of noise levels. "see" the strength of your WiFi signal.

* Image post processing

You have a 3d map of an area, plus pictures of all textures - rearrange to your hearts content.

* Alternate Reality

Completely change the look of the world around you, just because you can. (Semi-useful application: Interior decoration. See that couch right in your living room before you buy it)

There are tons of applications there. It mixes the "reality" of physical space with the malleability of the digital space.

<comment><USER3> I think I'm a neo-luddite.

<comment><USER5> I don't think you're a luddite. With any technology like this, it's important to ask: what applications does this really enable and will those applications simply be a waste of time.

This is an unveiling of a technology but the "applications" they show in this video are probably a waste of time to most users. Google have not shown a killer app that uses this tech. Maybe they're working on something (they hint that they may be planning to integrate indoor mapping into Google Maps which might be interesting) but they're not showing it in this video.

That doesn't mean the tech is bad. But we haven't seen enough to judge it as useful to end users.

<comment><USER6> Google Maps already has indoor maps.

<comment><USER7> Yeah but they even said in the video that they struggle with indoor navigation and positioning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Imagine measuring your room by just walking around in it." Yes, and imagine transmitting each of those footsteps in real time back to Google, so they can have a map of your room, too, in case they, or other parties, ever need it.

I was just having a discussion yesterday with a friend who works at Google about what data they store when you query their search engine. Every single keystroke, including backspaces, is stored. They don't just know what you ask. They know how well you can spell and know how well you type, not just in general but down to specific letter sequences. With this data, they can tell if you are regularly more impaired (fine motor control) at some times than at others, or if you're growing more impaired over time and match that against the content of your queries, etc.

"Phones that don't limit their boundaries to a touchscreen", meaning, we're not satisfied limiting our knowledge of you to just what we can extract from what you enter and how you enter it and when on a touchscreen. We want to know every step you take, when you sit, when you stand, how and where you walk.... SO much more data about you and your world that we can mine for treasure!

I'm not saying that Google is evil. My friends at Google certainly aren't. It's just that they are like kids in a candy store with unprecedented access to data and so many great, new algorithms for extracting information from it that they are just loving it, the way geeks would. But we're really going down a rabbit hole here.

<comment><USER9> Good god I am so sick of reading comments like this. This view of the world is just _lazy_. Almost as lazy as "remember, if you're using a service for free, you're not the customer, YOU'RE THE PRODUCT!", which seems to get parroted every single time there is any discussion related to google, facebook, microsoft, instagram, twitter, or any other web company that uses ads as a revenue model.

Yes, google can know what your room looks like. Google could also know literally every place you go, every message you send, every transaction you make through a bank, every website you visit, every photo you take, every person you meet, when you use the bathroom, when you sleep, etc. etc. etc.

Who _cares_? If you don't like these services, don't use them. Nobody is forcing you to use this device.

Have you, or any of the other people on HN who repeat this ad nauseum, ever considered the possibility that the people running google are actually just hackers who got lucky enough to have the resources to pursue projects that they think are cool?

I mean...what would you do if you had google's resources? If I had google's resources I'd probably be doing exactly what they're doing. Things like trying to improve the broadband situation in the United States, protected rhinos from African poachers, developing cool future-tech like self-driving cars, etc.

If you don't like modernity, stop using modernity. Move to a homestead in the pacific northwest, never use a telephone, never use grid power, grow your own vegetables, grow your own cattle, and keep away from the evil, scary spies at _gooooogggllleeee_ who are trying to...uh...give you better targeted advertisements? Or provide you with better search results?

<comment><USER10> > Good god I am so sick of reading comments like this. This view of the world > is just lazy.

I think your view of the world is the lazier of the two--you're basically saying "let's not worry about the negative implications of the things we create as long as our intentions are good".

> Who cares? If you don't like these services, don't use them. Nobody is > forcing you to use this device . . . If you don't like modernity, stop using > modernity. Move to a homestead in the pacific northwest, never use a > telephone, never use grid power, grow your own vegetables, grow your own > cattle, and keep away from the evil, scary spies at gooooogggllleeee who are > trying to...uh...give you better targeted advertisements? Or provide you > with better search results?

Here's how your entire comment reads to me: "If you're interested in thinking about the future implications of the new things we're creating, please shut up and go live in the woods, because you obviously hate modernity. I'm really sick of people thinking about the future and how we might be creating things that will eventually hurt us. The market comes before foresight, and commentary isn't welcome; when you have potential concerns for the future, the only acceptable response is voting with your feet. Please do that and don't ruin our fun."

What you miss is that one can object to a single, potentially dangerous aspect of recent developments (personal information collection and exploitation) while embracing technology in general at the same time.

In creating new technology, it's essential that we examine the paradigms we're creating. If no one's doing that, we're almost sure to run ourselves into serious trouble sooner or later. There's a reason you look before you leap.

Which is lazy: choosing not to use awesome new technology because it has some potentially dangerous implications, or just using any new and seemingly convenient thing that people come up with and assuming it's got to be okay?

<comment><USER11> I think the grandparent's point is to focus on things that are _actionable_. If you are worried about the information Google collects on you and so choose not to use Google products - fine, that's your right. But if you're worried about the information Google collects on you and so choose to plaster that all over message boards every time Google is mentioned - exactly what are you accomplishing? Do you think the people reading your comment don't already know what information Google has available? Do you think Google's going to change its practices because you complain?

<comment><USER10> > if you're worried about the information Google collects on you and so choose > to plaster that all over message boards every time Google is mentioned - > exactly what are you accomplishing?

If you're worried about the information Google collects about /everybody/, and you're posting in /relevant topics/, I think you're accomplishing quite a lot. I think it's really important that when new technology is announced, interested parties discuss both "here are some exciting new possibilities" and "here are some areas for concern". In an impartial discussion forum, a product announcement shouldn't just be an excitement-fest.

> Do you think the people reading your comment don't already know what > information Google has available?

This technology will likely result in Google and others collecting and having access to new sources of information about people. I think that many people reading the announcement might not immediately think about some of these implications, and I think it's a great time for review and examination of the topic.

> Do you think Google's going to change its practices because you complain?

I think some engineers and others working on this project and other projects at Google probably read HN, and I think comments here could have an effect on how they build this product and what data is eventually sent to the company. Reading these concerns might be a good reminder to reflect on these things from time to time as well.

> I think the grandparent's point is to focus on things that are actionable.

Action without reflection is a dangerous formula. Google is taking action by building this and announcing it. What we do at HN is learn, reflect, and discuss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "\- Johnny Lee and the ATAP-Project Tango Team"

Johnny Lee was the guy with the awesome Wii Controller demos back in 2007 (can't believe it's been that long).

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid- Uw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw)

edit: here's the full set of demos: [http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/](http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/) (also, I'm assuming it's the same guy, but his site says he's at Google now)

<comment><USER13> I am so happy to see a familiar face when I played the video.

Back in 07/08 when he demoed his hacks in TED it really blew my mind. [1]

I was really hoping someone would pick him up and let him loose on some projects.

I guess Google did just that.

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H1zrLZwPjQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H1zrLZwPjQ)

<comment><USER14> He worked on the Kinect project at Microsoft as well. In fact he put up the prize money for the Open Kinect contest run by Adafruit to develop drivers for the Kinect.

[http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/02/windows- drivers...](http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/02/windows-drivers-for- kinect.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wish I could go back to the time when I thought this kind of thing was awesome. Nowadays, it's just one more aspect of our private lives that'll be stored on Google's (or whomever) servers, sold to advertisers, harvested by the NSA, and abused by law enforcement. Add some object recognition to the 3D scanning, and you can start getting marketing messages about how much better [Featured Brand]'s refrigerator would suit your needs, courts will rule that no reasonable person would expect the interior contents of their house to be private and require a search warrant, and the DEA will be able to find something that looks enough like drug paraphenalia in the images from anyone's home to justify a home invasion of whoever their preferred target of the moment is.

<comment><USER16> I suppose the good news is that 3D point cloud data in context of a public setting wouldn't be much more invasive than the already-pervasive video surveillance we have today.

The bad news is as you say: having mapping data of your private residence siphoned off by third parties, be it government or private industry.

I would say I'm as excited as I am worried about the potential for this technology. That said, I think the privacy implications are very similar to Kinect, which is already here. The only difference perhaps being mobility.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did HN react to the Kinect or Kinect 2 this way? It seems like there's a lot of burden put on Google to not do stuff that could be creepy even though that's all they do.

<comment><USER17> I can't comment on "HN's reaction" because I don't tend to put much stock in trying to draw a consensus from HN.

However, my recollection is that there was a reasonably vocal reaction to the privacy implications of Xbox One / Kinect 2 in gaming and tech media, although they mostly related to the timing of the first Snowden leaks. This article is a pretty good example of the media hype around it: [http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/16/4526770/will-the-nsa- use-t...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/16/4526770/will-the-nsa-use-the-xbox- one-to-spy-on-your-family) .

I think the "always-on" nature was more criticized than the point-cloud/time- of-flight abilities of the camera, but pushback against more and more ways to collect data attached to equipment made by big tech corporations isn't exclusive to Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Really cool. I love how this could help the blind (my first thought when I saw how it worked - glad it was acknowledged in the video as a use case). The stuff Google's working on (and the face they're making it public is really exciting me (this, Glass, contact lens etc.). The more I see the more I think I'm going to spend more time developing for Google's platforms and less time developing for Apple's. I'm sure Apple has a few cool projects they'll be sharing this year but Google seems to be the one pushing the boundaries.

<comment><USER18> Since you mentioned it here is a project I'm working on with blind and visually impaired users with Glass [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEDg0k1HsH8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEDg0k1HsH8) and I'm interested in extending it using something like tango.

<comment> k-mcgrady Excellent work. Tango would make this incredibly powerful although I wonder how long it'll take to get those sensors packed into Glass.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm looking forward to the first first-person shooter built on Tango. E.g. a ghostbusters game in which you walk around in your own house, the ghosts only being visible through your Tango.

<comment><USER20> How about tactical coordination and mapping for teams (i.e. paintball / special operations)? I'm picturing the HUD 'map' from every FPS game, except it is based on the current view and relative locations of the team's devices.

<comment><USER21> How about a HUD that projects a map onto a firefighter's SCBA facepice?

That would be absolutely incredible... Firefighters die every year because they get disoriented and lost in zero-visibility conditions. Even if it didn't have a pre-generated map of the structure loaded... it could build a map as it went, and at least be able to provide a 'retrace my steps' view.

<comment><USER22> This just adds a depth camera to the phone and uses it and the visible light camera to map the space and orient the device. If a human is disoriented in a no-visibility situation due to smoke, the cameras will not likely be able to orient them either, except maybe something like a power outage, where visible light is unavailable but the depth camera can still function.

<comment><USER21> Why does it need to be a visible light camera? Why not infrared?

<comment><USER22> Depth camera isn't visible light, but will likely also be blocked by smoke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My submission:

3D Printing is a big data problem where the data is not being collected. Sensors in desktop 3D printers are usually restricted to simple limit switches on the axes.

We would use Project Tango for a real-time feedback system for 3D Printing. Initially, we would demonstrate a simple functionality: recognizing when a print is failing and instructing the machine to stop, rather than waste more material. Next, with the help of the open-source community, we would expand functionality to dynamically adjust machine instructions to compensate/fix problems observed during the print. Here are a few examples:

\- adjust bed height for different layer heights via software rather than manual hardware tinkering

\- dynamically change extrusion rate if underextrusion/overextrusion is observed

\- detect if belts are slipping & correct extruder positioning

\- pause print is no filament is extruding

\- intelligently resume print if stopped (e.g. power failure)

\- inform slicing software if/where/why a print fails so the software can reslice and repeat properly

For users, no new hardware will be needed besides Project Tango - a computer will stream GCODE instructions via USB to a RepRap-like 3D printer (e.g. Makerbot, Ultimaker, etc.). Project Tango is precisely the breakthrough we have been waiting for to make 3D printing more user friendly.

<comment><USER24> You can do that right now with a gazillion of applications that do photogrammetry. Project Tango is nothing new per se. Just add a stereoscopic camera, choose software and add the analysis/decision-making. Some links to get you started:

[http://insight3d.sourceforge.net/](http://insight3d.sourceforge.net/)

[http://ccwu.me/vsfm/](http://ccwu.me/vsfm/)

[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~snavely/bundler/](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~snavely/bundler/)

[http://www.arc-team.homelinux.com/arcteam/ppt.php](http://www.arc- team.homelinux.com/arcteam/ppt.php)

[http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/intelligent- robotics/ngt/ste...](http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/intelligent- robotics/ngt/stereo/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Unfortunately, due to FCC restrictions, we can only send development units to incorporated entities or institutions at this time."

That's a bummer.

Also, the page's default background-color should be set to black (or something dark). Most of the text is white(ish) and with a slow connection the background images take a while to load, making it impossible to read while you wait. /rant

<comment><USER26> This is a little creepy actually when you think about it. Here is this amazing new technology and the government says that only corporations are allowed to possess it. I'm sure that there are reasons but on the face of it I feel like it is right out of a cyberpunk book.

<comment><USER27> That just indicates that it hasn't passed Class B certification yet (under Title 47 CFR Part 15), which basically means that as an unintentional RF radiator (that is, at least in part not an intentional radiocommunication device), it hasn't yet been shown not to interfere with other devices. Even the wall wart for charging your phone needs to meet Class B in order to be sold or supplied for household use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Here's the application I thought was immediately obvious: memory palaces.

Based on the old mnemonic trick of taking a real physical location that you know well, and associating memories with objects in that space. The digital version of this would be having files and data stored in a "physical" place - although they're not solid, they'd be tied to a single location.

Harder to organise, but I know several people who have completely filled their computer's desktop with shortcuts, because they don't like futzing around with folders. The folder metaphor isn't the be-all and end-all, there are times when it's appropriate and times when it's not. The metaphor of icons that are dragged around the screen is limited by available screen space - Project Tango gives you a house-sized (or even just room-sized) 3D space to play with, more than enough for all the files you could need to be immediately visible.

The main risk is that my virtual room could end up as messy as my real room.

I don't know how anyone could make money from this, but it would be really damn cool.

</comment><comment><USER29> Here's the best idea I can think of with this technology.

Imagine taking a scan of your pantry, refrigerator, and/or laundry room. Then mark everything as what it is (e.g. "box of cheez-its", "milk", etc). Then come back a few days and do the scan again and it'll tell you what's missing. Once you return from shopping, scan again saying what the new items are (even if they aren't what was there). The software would probably need to recognize certain shapes so a slight rearrangement/movement doesn't change. It'd be like history/bookmarks/favorites for perishables!

<comment><USER30> Isn't it much easier to just look into your refrigerator/pantry and keep a mental track of things? There are a few pitfalls to your suggested method:

* It takes a good amount of time scanning and cataloging everything and we are taking about a world where people don't find enough time to scribble down these things on a piece of paper.

* What if you pulled out cereal box A and cereal box B but switched places when putting them back?

* Since its scanning the boundary of objects, it won't be able to tell you if your Milk is empty, half empty or full.

The one thing I could think of where this is useful is in scanning rooms/objects which are for sale. Like 3d scanning the bike you are going to sell, or a realtor using it to provide a virtual 3d tour of a house. However, Microsoft already did it with their Photosynth program and regular photos you take [1], so I am not sure how this is going to fair if it turns out to be expensive.

[1] [http://photosynth.net/](http://photosynth.net/)

<comment><USER29> My idea was more of a replacement for a shopping list, not necessarily one's memory. To do diffs on physical environments may help situations where the contents of the diff matter. Maybe you don't have to catalog, maybe it can just show you what shape appears to be gone. Yes, there are many practicalities not ironed out, but I could see it being useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I swear you could just write a "HN comment generator" script for these sorts of articles:

input: $new_google_tech

output string: "$new_google_tech will let Google know more about you! I disapprove! Also, NSA."

Repeat. Occasionally sprinkle with insightful comment about the actual technology being introduced.

</comment><comment><USER32> This kind of technology will lead to very big changes in the surveying industry, which is big. Also will lead to open 3d city models (the next openstreetmap will be in 3d and textured - IMO gmaps and apple maps will lose out to this eventually) and real-estate models (see your apartment without actually visiting) which will lead to lnock-on effects for a range of other property industry fields. Academically - urban studies (a field mostly based on experience and conjecture) will benefit hugely from realistic 3d modelling...

</comment><comment><USER33> That link seems dead to me. This article has more info:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7272849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7272849)

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/20/google-launches-project- tan...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/20/google-launches-project-tango/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Funny, the official tagline of the project is "We like epic shit". [http://i.imgur.com/mvcyUX4.png](http://i.imgur.com/mvcyUX4.png)

[https://plus.google.com/115422404677762786098/about](https://plus.google.com/115422404677762786098/about)

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if Google has a stack of experimental projects to release whenever a competitor announces some headline grabbing news.

<comment><USER36> PR works better when you don't compete with competitors for attention. You either beat them to the headlines, or you wait a couple of days to find a clearing. This announcement is interesting, but not nearly the scale of WhatsApp/FB.

An exception might be if you have a very similar announcement. Doing so would get you included in the same articles as your competitor.

<comment><USER37> >announcement is interesting, but not nearly the scale of WhatsApp/FB.

Wait, what? Why would Google view the WhatsApp news as competitive? Other than it setting an insane price and inflating bubbles more, how is the FB acquisition really useful news to anyone?

This tech will have far more impact on the world. Apart from the few people doing startups, FB buying WhatsApp will have almost zero impact in day-to-day lives.

<comment><USER36> > FB buying WhatsApp will have almost zero impact in day-to-day lives.

I was only responding in the context of parent's PR comment, re: scale of press worthiness of the day. Tech sites have been covering WhatsApp/FB non- stop for the past 24 hrs.

As for impact on the world, this is just a call for developers. I'm encouraged by the ambition, but it's too hard to judge if this will be successful. FB/WhatsApp will almost immediately affect 400M users (+1M more per day).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Interesting to see that this is coming from ATAP - the one part of Motorola that Google kept in the sale to Lenovo[1]. I was curious to see if they would merge the ATAP group into Google X, but I guess they're going to keep it separate and just rebrand it as Google ATAP.

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/29/5359068/google-keeping- mot...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/29/5359068/google-keeping-motorola- advanced-technology-group-project-ara-phone)

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm shocked by the distinct focus on fear and doubt about Google's intentions with this technology -- does it really matter _that_ much?

The rising tide lifts us all, and this technology can be ubiquitous within twenty years. Isn't that worth it?

<comment><USER40> Google is enormously huge, and the breadth of their product line is jaw dropping. This fact causes the instant reaction of connecting every "innovation" that comes out of it to be connected to greed for more and hunger for data. This would be an overtly exciting Kickstarter project to find out about, but when it is from Google, the perception is that they are managing to invade one more market.

They _are_ the Internet, they have the half of cellphone market, they sell apps, books, CPU cycles, they sell Chromebooks, tablets, they make maps, they provide apps for chat, video conferencing, they've made an online office suite, they store your documents, they make the mobile OS that is sold on other company's mobile phones, they do mobile payment, they create programming languages, they employ Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, and probably the guy you envy the most, they have quantum computers and they do a sh*t load of other things that I can't bother to remember (Translate, Youtube, G+, Blogger, Groups, ...).

It is not possible (for me, at least) to attach Google the childish excitement that two geeky weirdos with scruffy hair bear for their fundraiser. Google is now the hot kid in the school, who's tall, strong, handsome and athletic, who also plays guitar and is very successful at his exams, speaks three languages and represents his school in the drama festival, and also participates in the school band as whoever the guy who gets the most attention in a band.

Innovation is good for science, but it is harmful to the collaborative efforts when it comes from companies that should've been saturated. When Google dies (like anything else), it will fell over the crowd that lives under it's shadow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This technology inside Google Glass would be pretty killer.

<comment><USER42> As long as it's in the phone, couldn't you tether it to Google Glass to generate a real-time HUD based on where you were? (and perhaps also capture images to attach to the 3D model)

That was the first thing I thought about - actual augmented reality down to the inch would be quite something.

<comment><USER43> With future versions of Google Glass perhaps. The current version does not have a display that can provide a HUD in the way that it seems you are thinking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is the return of Johnny Chung Lee! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_(computer_scientist)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_\(computer_scientist\))

</comment><comment><USER45> Isn't the next _win_ turning your house / apartment into a game world / holodeck using something like this together with an Oculus Rift?

Household layout and furniture are mapped out, then re-textured to represent a castle, evil lair, enemy corporation, etc. Textures can update allowing the story to reuse each room as different places as you progress - the same way the holodeck area is actually small but uses optical illusions to give you a sense of greater mobility.

Not saying we have holodeck. But it's a step towards.

</comment><comment><USER46> I wonder if it uses the machine vision aspect to prevent the typical problem of accelerometer drift. e.g. by orienting itself relative to walls/other stationary things.

Also, imagine making a 3D "scanner" that you can scan objects with into a virtual world, or print out on a 3D printer.

<comment><USER47> Accelerometers usually don't have significant drift - digital gyroscopes do. The acceleromters are quite noisy though (and measure both gravity and acceleration). From some of the brief images in the intro movie it looks like the cameras are doing tracking and alignment of "interesting" features. Things like that fall into the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technology area. Very cool stuff.

<comment><USER48> Well, maybe was I just unlucky, but I tried to use an IMU for my SLAM and was shocked by the extravagant amount of drift of accelerometers.

<comment><USER49> Do you mean the accelerometer values drifted over time (i.e. the direction of gravity shifted on a stable accelerometer) or do you mean the value when doubly integrated drifted?

<comment><USER48> Right: the doubly integrated values shifted while the sensor didn't move.

<comment><USER48> *drifted

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> It's great to see mobile 3D scanning receive validation from a major player like Google. My company, RealityCap, is working on bringing 3D scanning to mobile devices without the need for specialized 3D cameras. We use the sensors already present in smartphones: the camera (monocular), accelerometer, and gyroscope. That means that we can bring 3D scanning to millions of mobile devices that already exist. [http://realitycap.com](http://realitycap.com)

</comment><comment><USER51> Every time something new comes out from Google or Microsoft, I just wait to see where is the catch. There is always _the catch_.

<comment><USER30> I guess the _catch_ in this would be that they get to integrate the public scans with Google Maps and/or help train Google Glass about the surroundings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> As someone who's worked on visual odometry projects before, I'm extremely interested in how they're able to compute the phone's motion estimations so accurately and in real time on a mobile device. Is any of this project open source? Is anyone here familiar with the vision techniques they're using to accomplish this feat? Perhaps there's an FPGA or ASIC designed for visual odometry inside the phone.

<comment><USER53> It uses a Myriad 1 processor from Movidius [http://www.movidius.com/tango](http://www.movidius.com/tango). It's a custom media coprocessor aimed at mobile devices. I found more information about the processor architecture in these slides : [http://www.hotchips.org/wp- content/uploads/hc_archives/hc23/...](http://www.hotchips.org/wp- content/uploads/hc_archives/hc23/HC23.19.8-Video/HC23.19.811-1TOPS-Media- Moloney-Movidius.pdf)

Edit : Video of the talk associated with the slides [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiTaPRtN2yM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiTaPRtN2yM)

<comment><USER52> Thanks for the info. Still very impressed with the speed and accuracy, assuming it works as well as they have presented. To be able to compute visual odometry in an arbitrary scene on a mobile device seems like a really big accomplishment, no?

<comment><USER53> Visual odometry is getting quite accurate. For example, it is used on the Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) to improve the position obtained from wheel odometry [1]. As you mentionned, the big accomplishment is doing this in real time on a mobile device. On a typical mobile ARM processor, it would probably be very slow and drain the battery in no time. That's why they are using a custom coprocessor designed specifically for image processing and computer vision. The next challenge is porting the existing visual odometry algorithms on this new processor. It looks like hiDOF did the implementation [2].

[1] [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rob.20184/abstrac...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rob.20184/abstract)

[2] [http://hidof.com/projects/project- tango/](http://hidof.com/projects/project-tango/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Tango looks a lot like The Structure Sensor by Occipital - [http://structure.io/](http://structure.io/)

<comment><USER55> I still like that Occipital is planning to ship a standalone unit, and support people wanting to 3D print various housings.

I guess the positive interpretation is that crowdfunding seems to be putting some pressure on larger companies to go public with research projects earlier than they normally would.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> "written in Java, C/C++, as well as the Unity Game Engine" \- good news and a discreet way of saying they support C# via Mono!

<comment><USER57> Except you can't really use Unity for standard line of business applications and their Mono runtime is stuck in .NET 3.5 land.

<comment><USER56> I personally don't like Unity, but at least Google is starting to think out of the mainstream OSS box.

<comment><USER57> I was looking forward to the FOSDEM talk about ART, but they cancelled it.

The only thing we can infer from the public source code is that it has been enabled by default for whatever might be the next release.

So no news if with ART, other languages could be better supported or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Ulterior motive: [https://xkcd.com/1204/](https://xkcd.com/1204/)

</comment><comment><USER59> Is anyone else getting 404?

        The requested URL /atap/projecttango/ was not found on this server. That's all we know.

<comment><USER60> Yes.

Google Cached: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VI0ttG...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VI0ttGWUYloJ:www.google.com/atap/projecttango/)

Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe10ExwzCqk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe10ExwzCqk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I think a game that maps your home or yard or street or whatever, recognizes common objects like trees, benches, cars, houses, people, etc, skins them with some sort of other-worldly skin, and allows you to walk around in the world finding virtual treasures and going on dynamic, virtual quests and fighting monsters by _actually walking around_ would be the first literally fully- immersive game. incorporate events queued by actual sound coming in through the mic and you have the coolest game ever made, to date.

think ingress, but overlaid in real time on what your camera sees and phone hears, instead of just on google maps.

</comment><comment><USER62> Google needs more data so that Google Maps can map the inside of your house. :-)

</comment><comment><USER63> Did I understand this correctly, will this actually map onto virtual Earth geometry at the same position and scale as real-life? That would be amazing, you would literally be able to use Google Maps to walk inside buildings and look around not to mention it could be the first Earth-accurate metaverse. Imagine sitting down with a more advanced pair of Google glasses and being able to see both your real-life environment and its identical online copy with virtual avatars navigating the hallways along with your real-life co-workers.

</comment><comment><USER64> GPS tracking + complete 3D environment history of your presence.

I can imagine how NSA is excited :)

</comment><comment><USER65> interesting that they built this into a phone. but i guess once you need a mobile computing device with a screen and a camera you end up with a "phone" nowadays.

the reliance on lenses is a hinderance though as it has two and holding it without covering them both requires user effort. you can see it at the end of their video where a finger is partially over the second lens.

still, exciting!

<comment><USER66> Surely the right place for this is in a google glass. Or at that point, given the sensors required, a google helmet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Is it just latent paranoia, or can I just see evil uses for this?

<comment><USER68> Every new technology, as well as every old technology, can be used for "good" or for "evil." More broadly, many activities to which "goodness" can be assigned will vary in "goodness" based on the context (in many ethical systems).

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> > _updating it's position and orientation in real-time_

ITS NOT IT'S

<comment><USER70> Or, you could reword your comment (which I upvoted):

It's not "it's"! It's "its".

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe10ExwzCqk#t=19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe10ExwzCqk#t=19)

19 second mark shows they are using monocular structure from motion.

Some Japanese Uni has a working solution(HDL inside FPGA) doing same thing too [http://hackaday.com/2014/01/12/autonomous-quadcopter-fits- in...](http://hackaday.com/2014/01/12/autonomous-quadcopter-fits-in-the-palm- of-your-hand/)

you can try it yourself, code is on github [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E35xbo3r8rA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E35xbo3r8rA) [https://github.com/nymanjens/ardrone- exploration](https://github.com/nymanjens/ardrone-exploration)

</comment><comment><USER72> This is really amazing. This is basically the stepping stone for 'self driving car' equivalent applications for indoors.

One wonders what Google is upto. Big investments in AI research, and then things like this. You could build domestic robots to do all sorts for work with a technology like this.

And I'm not just talking of toys or games here. The very nature of consumer electronics can be redefined with technologies like these.

Something to think of:

2015:

-> By now, it is likely that "clean a house" will be within the capabilities of a household robot.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil)

</comment><comment><USER73> This should be interesting to the guys who made Minecraft Reality.

[http://13thlab.com/](http://13thlab.com/) [http://minecraftreality.com/](http://minecraftreality.com/)

<comment><USER74> So how long will it be before someone can take a picture of a person and find all the similar matches on Tinder modulo any profile preferences and desired attributes? Maybe save it for later and use it in a completely different location? In other words, take a picture and then have an app that finds as many matches for that person all while applying any filter preferences the user has in his or her own profile. One person may see exciting matching opportunities. Others may use these modern technology aids in becoming the ultimate modern predator. It's one thing when you want to find a great date. It's quite another when someone uses it to find your son or daughter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> I understand the idea that you can get the exact positions of the surrounding, if you have an accurate position of the device. But how are they achieving that? I don't know of any such small tech capable of being accurate to 1cm, without external help.

I don't see how can they do this without an accurate position of the device.

An example when it breaks down without the position information:

Pointing the device perpendicular at an uniformly colored wall and moving parallel to the wall. Then the visual information is undefined and you have to rely on very accurate position sensors( which don't exist ) to correctly scan the environment.

<comment><USER76> I'm sure tiny gyros and accelerometers have improved in the past couple years. They've probably advanced dead-reckoning using existing sensors. And maybe they can use both front and back cameras for position information.

<comment><USER75> But they haven't improved. Oculus is having these problems right now. Their best solution is having an additional camera looking at the user, and they have a much simpler task with a stationary user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Forget the phone, this is technology is ideal to merge into Google Glass.

<comment><USER78> Google Glass: now with Spider-Sense!

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> Not a single woman in this entire video.

edit: actually there's one I saw in the background as a camera pans over a table, but 99.9999% of the people represented here are men.

<comment><USER80> yeah, and I thought it was a bit odd that they were all sitting so close to one another

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I like the mapping ability, imagine mapping out your house and be able to use it as a level in a game, like walking on your ceiling with Oculus Rift.

</comment><comment><USER82> It would be very interesting to see an application for this using Glass. Could this potentially help blind people navigate in unknown environments?

<comment><USER83> Yeah it could be used for that, though I'm not sure why Google Glass would be used in that situation. A chest strap to mount the device looking forward and maybe headphones in the blind user's ears (to speak out TTS directions, or even just tones which represent directions) would be a better feedback mechanism.

<comment><USER82> I agree. I suppose a Google Glass would be a bit silly since the screen would be unused, but seeing as it has most of the technology built in already, it would be easier to get a prototype working. An ear piece is another bonus added to the device as it could notify the user of obstacles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Space detection is very exciting to me, but this feels like a technological stopgap. Is there any research being done into "blind" space detection, that doesn't require the use of cameras? Is that even possible? It would be amazing if I could have my phone in my pocket and (for example) adjust the rotation of a nearby camera based solely on my hand gestures.

</comment><comment><USER85> awesome. I continue to be amazed at Google's breadth of ambition. If it works, which I assume it mostly does, I think it will be beneficial to most. Some (perhaps even some division of Google itself), will do something totally asinine and attempt to subvert the original intents of the engineers and designers who are currently involved. But that's what happens with any new technology that broadens access and visibility. I don't believe anything Google does is inherently 'evil' on its face.. unfortunately, given their reach, they are a natural access point for some federal agencies to execute their primary tasks, as they fall under the same vague, broadly defined national security laws as we all do. The only difference is that we don't run the Internet and its major consumer touch points. Google does and they need to make money from their capital investments. It would be smart to use it and do something cool.

</comment><comment><USER86> Contest finished at the moment it is started?

[http://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/terms/](http://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/terms/)

"The Contest begins at 12:00:00 A.M. Pacific Time (PT) Zone in the United States on February 19th, 2014"

"On or about February 19th, 2014, each Essay will be evaluated by the Judges."

#memonkey

</comment><comment><USER87> Cool technology and all, but i find that it is an odd fit for phones. Apart from games and other gimmicky applications, or exceptional cases like navigation for the blind, what are the awesome applications of space detection for a phone? I can think of much more interesting applications in mobile devices like cars.

<comment><USER88> Think of a phone not as a phone, but more like a really cheap way to have a portable computer with a screen and battery that you can put sensors on. It comes in the phone package because the industry is very much geared to churning out that form factor on the cheap.

Edit: and you can duck tape it to [car|bike|ect].

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> I hope I can strap one on an RC plane or multi-rotor and map my neighborhood. That would be kind of cool.

</comment><comment><USER90> If you were to build an Android powered robot isn't this exactly what you'd need inside it?

</comment><comment><USER91> Cool would be if this mixed-reality game here would be on Tango: [http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gbanga-famiglia-rise- and-f...](http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gbanga-famiglia-rise-and-fall- game/x/5121343)

</comment><comment><USER92> I think the video made the mistake of focusing on features, and not benefits. (Not saying that the benefits aren't there, just that I personally don't see them, and the video didn't do a good job of making them apparent).

</comment><comment><USER93> I can see this being HUGE in the real estate market. Imagine if a house seller can walk through his house with one of these, then upload the data to a website and now you can have a truly online "open house".

<comment><USER94> How is this different than say, walking around your house with your smart phone recording video, and then pushing a button to upload it to your real estate ad?

Advantage Tango: The user could manually navigate the virtual house.

Advantage Standard Video: Improved accuracy, no wonky 3D model and texture recreations, but actual video. Runs on low end hardware, no fancy plugins required. You can turn on lights, open drawers, show how a sliding door works, or how the fridge looks inside.

If I had my choice, I'd take video over Tango for real estate. Even so, video has been around for ages, it's dead simple to create and upload, yet never used. Therefore, if video hasn't taken off in the past decade, I can't see Tango having any noticeable impact on the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Generating CS maps from the university campus now becomes ridiculously simple :)

</comment><comment><USER96> I can see tech like this being used in the next Bond film. Every day, the advances in modern technology surprise and impress me. I love our line of work, where we can set our mind to something and just make it.

</comment><comment><USER97> Anyone recall the mapping drones from the recent Ridley Scott film "Prometheus" ? (similar concepts in other films too I think)

Combine this with a small smart-ish drone and it could get very interesting.

</comment><comment><USER98> Some of these applications sound more promising than the user input applications Leap Motion has been touting. I bet there are massive commercial opportunities for technology like this.

</comment><comment><USER99> Get this story and 4 other in top5HN Newsletter. Signup at [http://top5hn.launchrock.co](http://top5hn.launchrock.co)

</comment><comment><USER100> Applied for our local Hackerspace. I hope Google will consider applications not only from companies, but from community R&D labs as well :).

</comment><comment><USER101> I am a little bit disappointed, that I have to be part of a company to apply there. No time to work full time while doing my masters.

</comment><comment><USER102> Looks cool. This reminds me of what Dekko was working on while they were still in business, though I suppose at Google scale.

</comment><comment><USER103> Could this do real-time position, rotation, and gesture tracking if it was embedded in a VR head-mounted display?

</comment><comment><USER104> Makes me think of the arm computers from the Neanderthal Parallax. I'd love to get my hands on one of these

</comment><comment><USER48> Argh, this is my phd subject. Not sure wether this is good (for the lights) or bad news... What do you think?

</comment><comment><USER105> Paracosm as partner? Isnt this exactly what the paracosm startup was doing? Does anyone know the story?

</comment><comment><USER106> Surely I'm not the only Charlie Stross fan who immediately thought "SCORPION STARE"...

</comment><comment><USER107> Couple it with neuromorphic engineering, and we have a good robot AI technology in our hands!!!!

</comment><comment><USER108> This is the embodiment of the phone-scanner-mapping thing from The Dark Knight. Fascinating!

</comment><comment><USER109> With enough precision this could work really well for set extensions/reconstruction.

</comment><comment><USER110> Pretty much all junk and ancient looking. It's sad this genre has not advanced.

</comment><comment><USER111> Great idea! I think it can be very helpful to navigate blind people.

</comment><comment><USER112> Fun to imagine this tech being put into a contact lens.

</comment><comment><USER113> Google's answer to iBeacons?

<comment><USER114> Totally different. iBeacons are a low power Bluetooth transmitter that can notify phones of their presence.

This is a prototype phone for mapping scenes in 3D

</comment></comment><comment><USER115> s/updating it's position/updating its position/

</comment><comment><USER116> Getting a 404.

</comment><comment><USER117> 404 error

<comment><USER118> where you get the 404?

<comment><USER119> I get one when clicking the submitted link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER120> This is not creepy at all...</comment>


I'm going around the world and want to meet as many startups as possible. Help - <AUTHOR> http://startingup.me/im-going-around-the-world-and-want-to-meet-as

<comment><USER2> I'm seriously considering buying tickets all over the world just to spend more time hanging out with you. If I was a startup person living in any of these areas or nearby I'd sign up for sure.

<comment><USER3> ...hoping UK gets added to the list...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a bit of a shameless plug (I work for one of the organizers of the event), would really recommend you to tweak the schedule a bit to be in Kyiv, Ukraine, on October 25-26 — Investors' Day Central and Eastern Europe will be undergoing, with quite a lot of startups from the region attending (had over a hundred last year) and plenty of opportunity to communicate.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds amazing. Unfortunately, our schedule is already set. But if anything changes, this is great info to know :)</comment></comment>


Your Life Is Worth $10M, According to the Government [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/07/17/870483369/your-life-is-worth-10-million-according-to-the-government <comment><USER2> This is really great!

A couple of anachronisms:

the Macbook inside the robot (!!!)

the TI calculator (that one looks to me like it's from the 1990s)

the mojibake on the printouts (looks pretty Unicodeish to me)

Can you spot any others?

P.S. an explanation of the importance of doing this according to HPMOR:

> Every time you spend money in order to save a life with some probability, > you establish a lower bound on the monetary value of a life. Every time you > refuse to spend money to save a life with some probability, you establish an > upper bound on the monetary value of life. If your upper bounds and lower > bounds are inconsistent, it means you could move money from one place to > another, and save more lives at the same cost. So if you want to use a > bounded amount of money to save as many lives as possible, your choices must > be consistent with some monetary value assigned to a human life; if not then > you could reshuffle the same money and do better. How very sad, how very > hollow the indignation, of those who refuse to say that money and life can > ever be compared, when all they're doing is forbidding the strategy that > saves the most people, for the sake of pretentious moral grandstanding...

[https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/82](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/82)

The video seems to agree -- doing the calculation allowed OSHA to justify the regulation, in part because _there are still other safety regulations that wouldn 't be justified_ under the same method (it's not a blank check for OSHA to impose every safety regulation it can ever think of). (The cost-benefit robot saying that it now understands the value of human life might sound ironic, but it _didn 't_ understand how to account for them before the calculation and it _did_ after the calculation, so, kinda?)

</comment><comment><USER3> For those who are new/naive to this concept and find the statistical value of life repugnant, consider this (which others have quoted to me):

"If you refuse to put a value on life, the value that will be inserted into the spreadsheet concerning the value of life is 0."

<comment><USER4> "Invaluable" assets are a thing, and usually valued at "1" of the most commonly used unit of currency ("1 dollar", not "1 cent").

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd love to see someone do an analysis of how much each state is (implicitly) valuing a statistical life in the COVID19 age. For example, given state A which opens quickly, and state B which opened much more cautiously, it seems that A is valuing lives at a lesser amount, while B is valuing each life more. I guess this could be tricky to tease out of the data, yet it seems like it could be fun problem for an economist and a statistician to team up on

<comment><USER6> You'd have to work out the human cost linked to the cost of economic losses from lockdown, though. Unemployment increases death rate and shortens lifespan. I'd love to see somebody do this too, but it's a mountain of work.

Another factor to consider is that nobody knows the future. Let's say I invest $10m in a scheme that I expect to save 10 lives. Alas, the guy I gave the money to chose to spend it all in Vegas then jump off a tall building. If you look at outcomes alone I spent $10m for -1 lives. Does this mean I value lives at -$10m?

Applying this to coronavirus response, it is more likely that the fast-opening states have convinced themselves that the infection rate can be kept under control, and it will cost them less in terms of both lives _and_ money to open sooner. Whether they're right or not is another matter entirely, but people lose their life savings betting on the stock market all the time.

<comment><USER5> > Applying this to coronavirus response, it is more likely that the fast- > opening states have convinced themselves that the infection rate can be kept > under control, and it will cost them less in terms of both lives and money > to open sooner.

Yes, I agree. See [https://www.npr.org/2020/04/06/828345390/pandemic-onomics- le...](https://www.npr.org/2020/04/06/828345390/pandemic-onomics-lessons-from- the-spanish-flu)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a subtle fallacy of equivocation. Payment incurred after a loss is not the same thing as worth. Human life is invaluable, but that doesn't mean we can pay infinite money for restitution. Even if we could, monetary (quantitative) compensation could never replace the qualitative value life has to you, your loves ones, etc.

<comment><USER8> Except that we make choices daily on that. We choose to have alcohol for pleasure in exchange for health, we get on an airplane to travel the world at the risk of a plane crash, etc. We constantly trade life for money.

The problem is not in the sophistication of a method to value human life, its just a tool for analysis. The problem is the utilitarians eager to decide who lives and who dies, something very present in the current pandemic.

<comment><USER9> Neither of your examples are trading life for money

<comment><USER8> Pleasure for Money + Pleasure for life -> Money for life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life)

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems high

</comment><comment><USER12> And according to me, the government is worthless.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps that is true in your country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> $10M may be the monetary value used for these type of calculations, but when you look at our country's yearly budgets, it's clear that each live is valued much lower than $10M. Especially after seeing our response to Covid-19.

<comment><USER6> The government thinks $10M per life is about the right number _on the margin_ given US's economic situation and the slack they have in the annual budget. Obviously if there's a nuclear war tomorrow, or something else that drastically changes either the money supply or the number of people who need saving, the exchange rate would be different.

Realistically I think the value should be a lot lower, considering there are many interventions you could do that saves more than 1 life per $10M, even if we confine calculations to the US. (World-wide the marginal cost of a life is probably less than $10k). Of course you have to also take into consideration what is politically and organizationally feasible, so perhaps $10M is the _government 's_ marginal cost of a life considering its set of permissible policies.

...Or maybe somebody just pulled a number out of a hat to justify an expensive piece of legislation in the 80's, and nobody's bothered to update the number since.

<comment><USER4> This is the thing - it's likely the exact value for a human life varies dramatically depending on the context.

That's because they're not usually attempting to assign a value to human lives in any abstract sense.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A flat file CRUD API with just one PHP file - <AUTHOR> http://acostanza.com/2018/03/31/incredibly-simple-flat-file-cms-strategy-static-websites/ <comment><USER2> Curious--why are you reimplenting HTTP methods? Why not just use POST, PUT, GET and DELETE instead of a custom method query param?

<comment><USER3> One reason is it's a lot easier to demo in person because you just need a browser. I wouldn't design any serious API with query params but I can understand the appeal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "One file" is a bug, not a feature

<comment><USER5> The file has 78 lines, defines no functions, and performs and documents a well defined single task. It is significant as a learning resource, and useful by itself to interface a webapp to a local file-system. It is written in idiomatic old-style PHP. There is a lot to like and it is easily digestable. Then someone comes along and says it should be more complicated.

<comment><USER4> Short code isn't automatically more simple. For example, you put your secrets directly in this file instead of environment vars or memory or a config file.

Then what if you want to add a Twilio library? But then the original author updates the single file, and you want to pull the changes? Very complicated.

Every good software project is concerned with maintenance, not writing the fewest lines or having a single file.

Also, as someone who has written PHP for 20 years, I don't know what "idiomatic, old-style PHP" could mean other than "bad code".

<comment><AUTHOR> The entire reason I made this is because I wanted to do one really simple thing: store the names of shows in a file that I could then resolve against the TvMaze API so I could track shows with minimal effort. I figured maybe other people would be interested in that the approach is extremely simple, which is the whole point.

Twilio library? That defeats the entire purpose of this, which is to allow simple CRUD operations on a JSON file to resolve against using a React/Angular style SPA. This is not intended for more complex web applications. Also, further this is simply example code, not something I am planning on updating in any way, because it served the purpose for what I needed.

I actually have made an SMS Marketing App and for that I used Python (Flask), PostgreSQL, Angular 4, and Docker with nginx to bring it all together.

I specifically say in my blog post that this isn't intended for teams or anything more complex than flat file CRUD. This would blow up really quickly and be a nightmare to work with as a team - there isn't even any sort of validation.

The truth is, most of the time I write APIs using either Java 8, Express/NodeJS in TypeScript, or Python with Flask with a persistence layer like PostgreSQL all backed by Docker. I felt like that was huge overkill for storing just the names of shows, and I didn't want to have to store this on a VPS with a reverse proxy... I figured one PHP file was really all I needed for the CRUD operations.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Ruby web development – without rails. Options? Recommendations? - vanilla-almond I'm looking for a small and lightweight framework or gem primarily for sign-in/authentication.
Whenever I search online for ruby web development tutorials or guides, there's disappointingly few results when you exclude Rails.
If you are doing Ruby web development without Rails, how have you found the experience? What are the frameworks or gems you are using? Any problems you've encountered? (e.g. performance, lack of libraries or incomplete documentation) <comment><AUTHOR> Check out warden, potentially with sinatra. [https://github.com/hassox/warden/wiki/Overview](https://github.com/hassox/warden/wiki/Overview) explains warden and [https://github.com/jsmestad/sinatra_warden](https://github.com/jsmestad/sinatra_warden) is a basic sinatra wrapper (totally optional).

</comment><comment><USER2> Sequel: small and very easy to grok, used it on several small projects. Things get tricky if you try to scale it, so best for projects which are, by their nature, limited in scope.</comment>


CloudFlare, We Have a Problem (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2016/07/14/cloudflare-we-have-a-problem/? <comment><USER2> In case readers are interested in the HN community input to this issue, there are two substantial discussions from 7 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12105188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12105188) (163 comment)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12096321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12096321) (24 comments)

Of course, if you have anything new to add it will have to be here, as discussion on those threads is now closed.</comment>


Building a unique, complex background sound from tens of components - <AUTHOR> http://defonic.ovh/?background <comment><USER2> Reminds me a lot of mynoise.net, which provides hundreds of sounds and multiple channels for each. Although the UI here is much easier to use.</comment>


Ford's new car will force you to obey the speed limit - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/24/ford-smax-speed-limit/ <comment><USER2> I'm with krapp: "Self-driving cars are potentially the greatest threat to human freedom since the advent of the internet."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6982537](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6982537)

<comment><USER3> @krapp makes an incredibly valid point if you look at the autonomous car as a pairing of an android phone and a kia.

if you look at it more like leaves on the surface of a creek, i think the true power of autonomous travel becomes clearer. I know in this place the love of profit is paramount, but i firmly believe we should strive towards resembling the electron and not the intention behind the key press when it comes to infrastructure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, I won't buy one. Too much automation in modern cars already; it should be a tool that does what I want it to, not an implementation of some manufacturer's impression of what I ought to want instead.

<comment><USER3> If you were going to design a tool for moving your self and 80 lbs of objects up to 80 miles from yourself and you wanted to do it in an hour or less, would it really be a gas powered aluminum box on a steel chassis with rubber feet?

<comment><USER4> No, I'd use an electric motor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes please.

Far too many people are killed due to the fact people think they're driving on a race track, people only stop to think of the consequences after they've disabled or killed someone and it needs to end. In my city here in Australia we have 40km enforced school zones where children are crossing, this only comes into effect a couple of hours in the morning and afternoon on school days. It would be interesting to see how this system could adapt to variable speed conditions such as school zones without becoming annoying and causing motorists to always disable the speed limiting mode thus rendering the feature pointless.

I really like this idea though. It definitely should be rolled out everywhere and be a standard feature going forward. If such a feature means you can get lower insurance premiums, I would be all for having this feature enabled if my car supported it.

<comment><USER3> i imagine some sort of circadian rhythm based around regional import/export. If autonomous vehicles become the order of the day, there will be much less 'road access'.

in terms of insurance, if the roads become phone lines and the vehicles signal, your trips would make you money should the system make you late or hurt you. if people could swallow a "transparent car tax" the companies that bid to solve infrastructure problems and maintain the System would be on the hook for errors.

the point of personal vehicles is commerce stimulus IMO and it is a money sink that profits very few and hurts a cluckton of others. I know people profit from mobility but cars do not create opportunity, they just expose it.

It is like a huge water slide that you pay to use after you buy a tube and a water tank and some weird squirting device that wets the slide for you and a couple stickers to prove you bought them all.

if i have to pay for a tube, i prefer the lazy river.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> To paraphrase Bill Gates, "80 MPH ought to be enough for anybody"

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://hypebeast.com/2015/3/elon-musk-believes-that-itll- soo...](http://hypebeast.com/2015/3/elon-musk-believes-that-itll-soon-be- illegal-for-humans-to-drive)</comment></comment>


Lsyncd - Live Syncing (Mirror) Daemon - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/lsyncd/

<comment><USER2> This is a great idea, but it violates my personal backup principle: make the backup site connect to the server. If the server has the necessary information to connect to the backup site and initiate the process, it most likely has the ability to connect to the backup site and destroy backup information in case of intrusions or security vulnerabilities. If the server never knows anything about the backup site (other than their public key), then even if the server is compromised, the backups should remain safe and secure.

<comment><USER3> This is true in the case of backup software specifically, but it looks like lsyncd is intended more for push-type situations like moving content from a private to a public network, mirroring sites, feeding CDN's and so on. In those cases you do want the source to control the operation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The tool clearly states in which situations it should be used or not used but I'm pretty certain that overtime it will be misused.

If you want real-time mirroring of your data, I HIGHLY recommend that you use <http://www.drbd.org> instead. Lsyncd is great if you just have a select few folders with small files that change often (or large files that rarely change).

</comment><comment><USER5> I do this kind of thing using a one-liner:

while true; do inotifywait -r --exclude '^\\..*\\.swp$' -e CLOSE_WRITE src_dir; sleep 1; rsync -a src_dir/ dst_host:dst_dir/;done

This version has a race condition, but is sufficient for pushing a source tree into a testing environment automatically during development. You could also use the -m switch to inotifywait and a while loop on the output to avoid the race.

I wouldn't want to use anything apart from manual deployment script to deploy to CDNs since a daemon adds another point of failure. To check for a failure you'd need to check that the daemon has done its job, at which point you'd be running a script to do this and so could just use rsync at that point instead.

</comment><comment><USER6> I could use this copy over static media to my CDN. Cron + rsync is annoying.</comment>