Fatal Collision Makes Car-Sharing Worries No Longer Theoretical - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/14/your-money/relayrides-accident-raises-questions-on-liabilities-of-car-sharing.html?pagewanted=2&_r=3&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> RelayRides is not carrying enough insurance. Individual coverage from car owners is inadequate, and car owners can't be expected to purchase commercial car rental insurance just to participate in RelayRides.

This kind of reminds me of AirBnB, where new forms of renting rely, in part, on deceiving users about the risks. RelayRides and AirBnbB business models rely in part on the savings from inadequate insurance coverage, where individuals are suckered into taking on commercial risks while still carrying only individual insurance and having unlimited personal liability.

<comment><USER3> I used AirBnB a couple of times, I think is a good idea. Prices aren't cheap at all, but you get an appartment with utilities and not a B&B room. However, I too keep wondering on the risks associated with renting. They are just difficult to estimate. The renter may put a bomb in the appartment, how do you protect yourself financially from this?

For this to make sense the number of the appartments (or cars) destroyed or damaged must me low enough that the cost for repairing is way lower than AirBnB revenues. Not sure this is possible with only 10% fee on renting although.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems perverse that mere ownership of something can create liability.

If she had failed to get some maintenance that made the car dangerous to drive, that would be one thing. But there is no indication that this is the case.

If a psychopath rents a VHS from Blockbuster and then uses it to bludgeon someone's head in, is Blockbuster liable for that act of violence? Sure, a VHS is not intended to be used this way, but a car is not intended to be crashed either.

<comment><USER5> It seems less perverse when you think of tort liability as assignment of the costs of risk, rather than punishment for negligent behavior. When someone drives a car, this creates risk. Who should bear this risk? Somebody has to, the only thing the tort system decides is who. If you don't assign the risk to the owner of the dangerous instrumentality, then you assign it to either the operator or the general public. Assigning the risk to the public essentially socialized the costs of this activity (which generates private benefits), so as a practical matter the tort system allocates the risk to the owner and operator. Under this system the operator has a responsibility to use the dangerous instrument carefully, while the owner has the responsibility to carefully choose who operates the dangerous instrument.

<comment><USER6> This doesn't seem any less perverse to me. Shifting responsibility to the operator makes sense for injury resulting from operation. Shifting responsibility to the owner only makes sense for injury resulting from the ownership (improper device maintenance, etc).

If you can hold the owner of a car liable for a crash then what stops you from holding the creator of a car liable for a crash? Why not go after Toyota? By this line of reasoning Toyota is just as culpable as Ms. Fong.

Indeed, some tort actions have gone beyond owners and even pursued manufactures -- particularly gun manufactures.

The idea that an object owner or object creator might be liable for the actions of an object user is unreasonable and perverse. It has a chilling effect on innovation and forces small businesses (who can't afford to lobby regulatory protections such as the Graves amendment) out of the market.

<comment><USER5> If owners are not liable, what stops the owners of inherently dangerous businesses like car rentals from shielding themselves from the inherent risks created by their activity by having judgment-proof operators operate that risk-creating business?

The issue here is not regulation of lobbying. It's the very simple fact that driving a car creates substantial risks that have a price. Someone must pay that price. Owners and operators of dangerous instrumentalities are much more appropriate to bear that price than injured third parties. Owners are much more likely to be able to bear the cost than operators. If you shield owners, than you are practically shifting the burden to the public. I.e. socializing the costs. Yes it's great for small businesses to shift the costs of their profit-making activity to the public.

Ms. Fong's ownership of the car gives her the right to profit by renting it. It is fair to link that right with the obligation for risks created by that profit-making activity.

<comment><USER6> Judgement-proof operators? Nowhere was it suggested that operators ought be judgement-proof. In fact, I suggested the exact opposite.

The issue is exactly one of lobbying. As the article notes, the auto insurance industry has successfully lobbied to pass the Graves Amendment, which nullifies vicarious liability for auto rental. The article mentions this, and you can read more here: <http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/uscode/49/VI/A/301/I/30106>

Car rental owners _are_ shielded by this lobbied-for legislation. The only question is whether Ms. Fong will qualify as a rental agency for the purposes of this law.

This is precisely a case where an industry has lobbied for an exemption which may exclude others from competing in said industry. It is a textbook example of regulation preventing disruption of an established industry.

<comment><USER5> Judgment-proof in the sense that the operator has no assets with which to pay the judgment.

The operator here _is_ liable. But if the operator has insufficient assets to satisfy the damages, the owner is a more sensible person to bear the costs of the accident than the injured party.

<comment><USER7> You're suggesting that the person at fault is the person who has money.

This is fundamentally unjust.

<comment><USER8> When a joint enterprise accidentally injures a third party, generally all possible outcomes are fundamentally unjust. That's what makes tort law interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't get the people complaining about the tort system. The tort system didn't create the losses here, the car and the driver created the losses. The people being severely injured created the losses, and frankly for severe injuries to 4 people in an accident that killed one person, $1.5 million is not an unreasonable estimate of the actual economic loss in this situation. The tort system is just allocating this loss to the parties involved.

The fact of the matter is that cars are dangerous instrumentalities. A car accident can create enormous costs. In car sharing, someone must bear the cost of this risk. With its $1m of liability insurance, RelayRides is taking on a fixed amount of risk, and allocating the rest to the car owner. I think you'd be stupid to take on this risk without more compensation than what RelayRides provides, but that's what Ms. Fong signed up for.

<comment><USER9> Individuals are largely shielded from taking responsibility for the dangers and costs of car crashes in the USA by special exceptions and allowances. Companies and commercial renters are not so protected. That makes consumers drastically underestimate the real costs of their car use and RelayRides is going to face a hard task in keeping it covered up for their individual providers.

Both civil and criminal liability for killing and injuring others with a car non-commercially are incredibly cheap. The usual penalty for killing someone with a car is no penalty at all, even though over one hundred people a day die from driver negligence.

<comment><USER5> I agree. The solution is fewer restrictions on tort liability, not more. If people bore the costs of driving, they would drive less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _On one hand, she is certainly an inviting target. After all, she has worked > full-time at Google and is now finishing her degree at M.I.T. She probably > has many millions of dollars of income ahead of her that a lawyer could try > to garnish._

Absolutely disgusting. Our system punishes those brilliant and capable minds that can drive the nations economy. Meanwhile, underachievers everywhere can sleep peacefully.

Unless her car was in a state of disrepair, any lawyer (off the record) would have to admit she couldn't be responsible. But hey, assigning liability is so much more lucrative than truth.

Also,

> _"RelayRides rejects any suggestion that it is acting in a self-interested > manner. "Our interest is in protecting Ms. Fong,""_

and

> _When I asked the company whether this meant cutting a check to Ms. Fong- > Jones if she ended up personally liable, Alex Benn, a lawyer who oversees > insurance for the company, had this to say: "What happens in any sort of > accident with insufficient coverage?..."_

seem at odds.

<comment><USER2> She has clear liability. She agreed, after reviewing the request, to rent her car, for a profit, to someone who was a reckless driver and did serious harm to others (and, sadly, himself). I hate the U.S. tort system but some liability in this case is pretty reasonable.

<comment> guard-of-terra No there isn't. You neither can nor should screen buyers and renters. This simply isn't your job. And it harms the business the big way. When people rent cars they also rent the risk.

<comment><USER5> The system creates liability for owners of instrumentalities that inherently create a risk to society, like cars.

Should to owners of a coal plant be liable if it explodes and injures people living nearby? Even if they weren't the ones who were operating it at the time?

<comment> guard-of-terra If they lease or sell it, they should not.

<comment><USER5> If they sell their ownership interest they clearly don't have liability. If they lease it, they are profiting from the operation of the dangerous instrument, why should they be insulated from the risks of that operation?

Again, realize that the tort system does not create the costs. Operation of dangerous things has inherent costs. Ownership of property implies the right to receive the benefits for that operation, so it should imply the obligation to bear the risks of that operation.

<comment> guard-of-terra The risk in this case is destroyed car, but not the health liability. If the car was dangerous, then there should be liability; if it wasn't, there absolutely should not.

<comment><USER5> No, the health liability is a risk of car operation. Accidents happen, and they injure people, even in the absence of negligence or poor maintenance. Driving creates a risk of injury to others, inherently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, this shows how fucked up US system is... In Europe this absolutely cannot happen. First, everybodys is health is insured by state, so whatever injuries in whatever car accident anybody may have, there's no claims to present to anybody - state pays everything. Secondly, one in Europe shall not fear any "pain-and-suffering suits", and even more when you are just the owner of the vehicle. Third, liability insurance is unlimited so if you totally trash somebody's Ferrari with your Yugo, no fear, you are fully covered.

<comment><USER12> I live in Germany, and not all of this is entirely true.

Liability insurance isn't strictly unlimited, the coverage limits are just very high - e.g. in Germany, personal damages are covered with a minimum of 7,5 mio. euro (with a maximum limit of 8 to 15 million per person, depending on the insurance company), and total damage is mostly limited at 50-100 mio. euro. For most accidents, these numbers are fairly equal to "unlimited".

About health insurance - I'm not quite sure how you come at the conclusion that state pays everything. Injuries in an accident are paid for by the liable party's liability insurance, the same as in the U.S.

<comment><USER13> Just for comparison, here in the us insurance for a 25k car and minimal (some 100 or 300k for the described case in the article) plus uninsured driver would be well over 1.2k per month.

In other countries i paid that per year for way more peace of mind.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure why you're paying $1200 a month for insurance but that's not the norm for US based auto insurance at all.

<comment><USER13> I'm not. I pay 300 a year, but i don't even cover my car.

But yesterday i did the car coverage for a used 09 bmw 128iC.

Couldn't get any lower than that on several websites

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think she's extremely naive to put her new car back into the pool before finding out how the courts handle this incident.

<comment><USER16> I think she's thinking logically. From the perspective of a RelatRides lessor, fatal accidents are low probability events. That she experienced such an event yesterday doesn't change the probability that she'll experience such an event tomorrow. She's only naive if every single RelayRides lessor who reads this story is also naive to continue using the service.

<comment><USER15> She's naive because she's choosing to re-enter a partnership based exclusively on the perceived benefits (make money, save the world, etc.) without having a clear interpretation of the associated risks. Worse yet, she doesn't even have a clear answer on what her current liabilities are from her previous vehicle. I'm amazed her insurance company offers her a policy given her apparent disregard for liability she's potentially assuming on their behalf. I agree with your last sentence.

<comment><USER17> > I'm amazed her insurance company offers her a policy given her apparent > disregard for liability she's potentially assuming on their behalf.

Insurance policies generally explicitly exclude commercial leasing of the vehicle, otherwise rental companies would already be ripping them off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't understand why they aren't going after the dead guy's insurance. He's the one who was at fault, not the owner of the car, so his insurance should be the one to pay for the injuries.

<comment><USER19> If the person didn't have their own car, I would be surprised if they had their own car insurance. The victims could sue the estate, but there might not be a lot of money in it.

<comment><USER20> In my state, you can't get auto insurance without a car. You can be a licensed driver, you can have money to hand the insurance company for your premium, but if you don't _own_ a car, you can't get car insurance. I don't know if you could get general liability insurance that would also cover you driving other people's cars.

But if it's the _car_ that's insured, why do specific drivers have to be listed on the policy? The way I understand it is even if I'm not listed on someone's policy and I'm driving _their_ car, _their_ auto insurance covers my fuck up when I cause an accident.

Doesn't seem right, but I suppose that's the way it works.

<comment><USER21> When you're driving someone else's car, their collision/comprehensive insurance covers damage to their car (although there's a chance their insurance company will decline to pay or decide to sue you depending on the circumstances). Your liability insurance covers personal injury and property damage that you cause to others.

Drivers are listed for two reasons. The first is because a big chunk of car insurance is liability insurance. The second is because the probability of the insurance company having to pay to repair or replace your car depends on the likelihood one of the drivers will cause an accident.

This is all made more complicated by the fact that personal injury lawsuits are a numbers game. If the driver didn't have insurance and their estate has very little money, it doesn't matter that making them liable is a slam dunk case. It's not worth the effort. On the other hand, if the car owner has insurance, is alive, and has a lifetime income potential in the tens of millions of dollars, that's worth a lawsuit even if the probability of success is lower.

It feels scummy, but most personal injury lawyers are investing in cases. They'll be happy to take a lower probability chance on a bigger return. It's not all that different from venture capital, although you could argue pretty easily that VCs are a more positive force for social good and value creation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hypothetical: I lend a hammer to a neighbor. He then goes and, after building the cabinet he needed the hammer for, kills two people with it.

Why am I liable for his actions?

This is the part of the rent-your-car story I just don't get. She had nothing to do with it. She should have zero liability. That's the part of the legal system that is really messed-up. Liability for this accident should sit squarely on the shoulders of those directly involved in causing it. The only way she should be liable is if the car had a known defect that caused the accident.

<comment><USER5> The difference is that car accidents are a foreseeable and inherent risk of car operation, but not hammer operation.

<comment><USER23> Car _accidents_ are foreseeable and inherent, but this guy was driving in the wrong lane, what if he intentionally did it as a suicide (not saying he did, but hypothetically).

What if someone rented a car and intentionally drove it into a crowd of people?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is beyond my understanding how could Ms. Fong-Jones even considered being responsible. This a complete bullshit. It is like suing knife salesman for each harmful incident involving knifes he sold.

Also I don't understand why people here say that "In car sharing, someone must bear the cost of this risk.". If lightning would stuck that car, who would they sue, Zeus?

<comment><USER25> Nobody would be sued, the owner of any property bears the risk of its accidental destruction unless they transfer some or all of that risk to an insurance company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Perhaps the answer here is to insist that a renter must either have valid insurance already that would pay out to third parties in the event that they were driving any vehicle. Most fully comprehensive insurance in the UK already covers this assuming you have valid fully comp on some car already.

For example I (being fully insured on my own car) could drive a friend's car without being specifically insured on it and were I to get involved in an accident (that was my fault) then damage to third parties are covered but damages to my friend's car are not unless his insurance specifically covers me.

If the renter doesn't have this insurance already simply increase the amount they have to pay to rent in order to cover it.

<comment><USER27> > insist that a renter...have valid insurance [or pay a higher fee]

If you don't own a car it is just about _impossible_ to buy a liability insurance policy. I know this. I tried. I tried very hard.

I don't own a car myself, but since I often rent a car when I travel, I decided that I'd try to buy a third-party liability policy instead of paying the absurd prices that Avis or Dollar charge (>$20 a day).

I called about 10-15 insurance brokers, and not one of them had ever written a "non-owner" policy. The standard answer I got was, "You have to own a car to get liability insurance; yes, it'll cover you for other vehicles you drive, but you have to have your own car for us to create a policy for you".

I realize that you are in the UK, so the situation might be different there. But in the US (and Canada), I think that RelayRides would have to be the one to provide the coverage, because the average RelayRides user (who likely lives in the same city and doesn't own a car) won't have his own liability insurance (and couldn't get it even if he wanted it!).

<comment><USER28> If you have any sort of credit record then most of the annual-fee credit cards provide rental insurance, and the fee is typically less than a small number of days of paying the rental agency.

<comment><USER28> ...but, as noted elsewhere, this does seem to generally exclude liability coverage so really isn't very helpful to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The egregious part is the limited insurance coverage ($1M from the rental company and $300K from the renter). This probably wouldn't happen in Europe.

<comment><USER30> Don't know about the rest of Europe, but here in Germany we also have limited insurance coverage.

By law the minimum for person damage is 7.5 million €, for property damage 1.12 million €. Usual sums are 50 or 100 million €.

So in the end it's very unlikely for something like that to happen in Germany.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Legal blabber aside, the tone in the article is infuriating - standard US media fear-inducing lawsuit crap. Instead of reporting on the legal hurdles or debating the consequences they just want to send a message that it's "dangerous" to engage in new business like this.

<comment><USER32> Articles like this tend to create a risk-averse culture, causing people to be afraid of failure. An article that was more negative towards the lawyers/tort law would be much better, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> As an aside, I've never heard of this service but it sounds like a terrible deal for the owner. I assume the $10/hour is supposed to help offset wear and tear, although I hope the renter has to at least replace the gas they use.

</comment><comment><USER34> Zipcar and similar car clubs makes a lot more sense than car sharing. You essentially join Zipcar and share the liability and car ownership costs. $1 million is not enough coverage in the case of a catastrophic accident, and the law and insurance companies have not caught up to car sharing.

I would not rent my car out unless the liability issue was better taken care of. But then again, I don't get car sharing vs. car clubs.

If you need your car so little that you can rent it out, why not just join Zipcar or another car sharing club?

<comment><USER13> The main thing is: \- she don't need the car often \- buys expensive new car \- buys a car that can't sit for a long time

If she researched a little more she would have not got a new hybrid but some old diesel. It's probably cleaner than agasoline hybrid doesn't generate all the upfront manufacturing garbage and batteries that are awful for the environment and reuse a car that is already made anyway.

<comment><USER35> _> If she researched a little more she would have not got a new hybrid but some old diesel. It's probably cleaner than agasoline hybrid_

I was under the impression old diesels were dirtier than gasoline engines. New clean deisels like in Audi's no, but old ones? But you're saying they're cleaner?

<comment><USER13> Not suggesting a 50s diesel. But anything up to the price of a prius would be better.

Point is, even a gasoline suv pollutes less than a prius overall if you don't use it that often.

Just arguing that as an engineer, you should look at other solutions instead of jumping the bandwagon. Let pointy hairy bosses and ruby on rails guys do it instead.

<comment><USER35> *>Just arguing that as an engineer, you should look at other solutions instead of jumping the bandwagon.

That's what I'm doing. I really want a diesel for my next car, but a clean diesel. Just wondering if there are any less expensive options than a new or relatively new Audi.

<comment><USER13> Previous diesels were awful because of the stuff we had in the diesel itself. The engines are still the same, mostly. any year car you get that still have good compression will give you a clean burn (if it's too lean, you get too much nitrogen oxide, to rich you get carbon and shoot).

if you want to go the extra mile you can either buy the hamburguer smelling vegetable conversion kits (too much hassle to refil imho) or you can spend extra and put a modern catalytic system in the old car and be done with it.

a 2000 VW, Audi, mbez will do wonders and cost from 6 to 12k.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I see a lot of discussion of the legal system and assignment of liability. There's an interesting fact about the legal system in non-criminal cases that is widely overlooked--there is usually no possible outcome that doesn't screw someone.

Accordingly, when someone is found liable in tort, it doesn't necessarily mean the court is _blaming_ them for the accident.

Let me give a classic example. Three men go out hunting. They come to a clearing, and two of the men go around on the left and the third goes around on the right.

A game bird flies up from the clearing when the two groups are on opposite sides. Both men on the left fire at the bird. One of them gets the bird. One of them misses the bird but hits their companion who was going around the right.

It is not possible to determine which man shot the bird and which shot the human. Both shooters claim that they definitely shot the bird, of course.

The third man sues the first two. There's no outcome that does not screw at least one of the three:

1\. The court could find neither shooter is liable, since it cannot be proven which actually fired the errant shot. That screws the third man since he got shot and cannot collect damages from the shooter.

2\. The court could find that both shooters are liable, and make each pay half the damages. Assuming each shooter can actually afford half the damages that is fair to the third man, but screws whichever shooter actually hit the bird.

3\. Furthermore, in #3, support it turns out one of the shooters has a lot more money than the other. Then in addition to screwing one of the shooters, the third man could get screwed in that he might not be able to collect enough to cover his medical bills.

4\. The court could find that the two shooters are jointly liable, and not even try to allocate blame between them. The third man can enforce the judgement against them however he wants. So, if one shooter has a lot of money and one does not, the third man would enforce against the one with the most money. This is good for the third man as it lets him get his medical bills covered. It potentially screws the wealthy shooter, though, if in fact he was the one who shot the bird--he's left holding the bag for all of the damages.

The way it actually happens in most states is #4. The idea is that of the three men the one who least deserves getting screwed is the guy who got shot, so we want to maximize the chances that he can recover full damages, and can do so quickly. Only #4 ensures that.

As far as the shooters go, if one of them isn't happy with the way the third man chooses to go about collating the damages, he's free to file a lawsuit against the other shooter to recover the amount he thinks he was unfairly forced to pay.

Note that even though one of the shooters did not shoot the third man, it was his shot that created the ambiguity as to which one of them did shoot the third man.

This is called "joint and several liability".

This is a pretty good system. It lets the party that is actually injured get damages quicker to get them on the road to recovery (and keep them from getting bankrupted by medical bills), but still lets the parties that contributed to the injury fight it out among themselves to figure out how, ultimately, the damages should be split among them.

Note: joint and several liability only applies to defendants who do have some liability, as determined by the court, I believe.

<comment><USER36> I understand that this is a somewhat contrived example used to illustrate a point, but there are many more options available to the court in this case:

1\. Both men that fired a shot are found liable because firing a shot knowing one of the men may be in a line of fire is irresponsible and potentially criminal.

2\. None of the men that fired a shot are found liable because the third man went into a section of the forest he wasn't supposed to go into because by doing so he put human life under significant risk.

3\. The establishment that manages the hunting grounds (a private organization, the state, or even the federal government) is found liable because it didn't properly segment the area to sufficiently prevent risk of human injuries.

4\. All three men are found liable because they didn't properly define necessary rules in order to prevent risk of human injuries.

In fact, in this case I'd argue that it's _irrelevant_ which man fired a shot that hit the third man. Either

a) Both mean fired when they weren't supposed to, in which case they're both liable.

b) The third man went where he wasn't supposed to, in which case he is fully liable for his own injuries.

c) A third party organization that manages the hunting grounds didn't properly set up the rules, in which case it is liable.

d) The men were responsible for setting up the rules themselves, in which case all three of them are liable.

If you look at the case this way, you can easily find an outcome that doesn't screw anyone. _Someone_ was responsible for ensuring proper safety precautions, and they didn't do their job. That party (or group of parties) is liable. The others are not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> If you wanted to rent your car out like this, how hard is it to set up an LLC so if god forbid something like this happens, they can't come after you personally?

<comment><USER38> Simply setting up LLC (or any other type of entity) is not sufficient. To shield your personal assets LLC needs to be properly capitalized and be managed like a proper business. Essentially, it will at least require carrying some kind of commercial insurance, plus having extra money in the bank for operating expenses (how much - depends on the business). This sort of defeats the idea of effortless car sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'd personally feel more comfortable putting my car into a car-share pool if I had to transfer the title to the pool in exchange for payouts and some kind of guarantee of a way to get the title of my car _back to me_ should I want to retake ownership. Shouldn't this alleviate the personal liability issue? The deaths involved are most certainly a tragedy, but I find it impossible to fault Ms. Fong for any wrongdoing.

</comment><comment><USER40> Just an analogy - what if you rent your house and the renter happens to be a serial killer and 'uses' the house to murder people, and in one of the acts kills himself. Won't it be ludicrous for the authorities to prosecute the owner ? Unless they can establish that the owner had prior knowledge of the serial killer and rented the house on purpose.

I don't understand how the owner of the car can be held responsible for the damages.

</comment><comment><USER41> Can someone explain to me why it isn't always the operator of the vehicle who is liable for death/destruction caused by their operation? Unless the brake lines were severed intentionally or the vehicle was provably neglected, then it would seem to me that the ultimate responsibility is on the driver who causes the accident- not the owner of the car or the company that facilitated the rental.

<comment><USER42> Well, he's dead. In some sort of spiritual way, he is liable. What's going on here isn't about the guilt or real liability, it's about trying to turn pain and suffering into money. The simple rules for that are if you're going to try to sue someone, sue someone that has money and sue someone that you can get the money from.

RelayRides, I would think, would be a better target, you might get more money faster but the reality here, unfortunate or not (depending on who's side you take,) is RelayRides is going to be sued and Ms. Fong is probably going to be sued too. Tell me why RelayRide's funders aren't the ones holding the bag here, figure that one out, you nearly never hear about that.

Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes people don't seem to mind. OJ Simpson was acquitted of murder (re: as in found not guilty by a jury) and yet he was sued for moneys due to the death of his ex-wife and her friend, everyone sort of felt okay with that. Ms. Fong, strictly speaking, didn't crash the car, but she stood to profit from the cars use and it was her car and she has insurance, she's going to likely get sued. It's a real bummer those folks got hurt, sounds pretty rough to me, I hope someone makes them whole or as whole as they can be. It's the system we've got.

<comment><USER41> I guess I see it as his estate being the one that is responsible financially at this point. Life insurance policy, home, car, investments, etc.

Her making $10/hr off it really just doesn't seem to factor in in my mind. Wrecking the car wasn't an expected use of that rental.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Who was this person who rented the car? He was driving in the wrong lane. What kind of screening did RelayRides do?

<comment><USER44> Beyond checking that he has a valid drivers license (not suspended, etc), what else do you expect them to do?

<comment><USER41> Exactly. Before renting _anything_ to _anyone_ should they undergo a 2-day full psychological evaluation to ensure that they are mentally stable, plus a full driving skills assessment? No, that's clearly absurd.

It should be the driver and his estate that is responsible in the end. If that estate does not have enough resources to cover the damages, then... well, shit happens and sometimes there's just no recourse for bad luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is a bit of FUD IMHO

Also, I've thought for some time that P2P car sharing should be over longer terms, like months.

<comment><USER46> Agreed

"That's why we can't have nice things"

Too much liability issues and because of (most likely) an irresponsible driver now they're (or better, someone that can pin any cost on the injured) goes after the car renter, car manufacturer, road authority, etc. They'll probably make a way for Steve Jobs to be liable as well if they can, I guess

"no longer theoretical" No crap sherlock. People have been getting injured in car accidents for the past 100 years.

By getting into a car and driving you assume a non zero risk of being injured or killed in a car accident. Do you want zero risk? Live in a bubble

Now his suddenly becomes a multi-million dollar cash cow for several 3rd parties.

Except for the victims of course, who'll have to deal with giant health costs (because of similar excess liability and regulation meandering by the authorities and greed by the medical industry)

Sure, liability is important, if it involved a drunk driver for example, or a fault that comes from the car maker.

But there's always a risk! And preventing some risks causes even more risks sometimes.

<comment><USER47> _By getting into a car and driving you assume a non zero risk of being injured or killed in a car accident._

By getting into a car and driving you assume a non zero risk of being sued for damages caused by a car accident.

<comment><USER48> Except that in this story she didn't cause the accident.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cryptsy Cryptocurrency Settlement - <AUTHOR> https://cryptsysettlement.worldsecuresystems.com/submit-a-claim <comment><AUTHOR> How are you meant to prove you held any crypto at this site?</comment>


A Song of DOS and WordStar - <AUTHOR> http://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/a-song-of-dos-and-wordstar/ <comment><USER2> Emacs, of course, has a wordstar mode that can be activated with M-x wordstar- mode for those of you who're curious enough to try it out.

The copyright for that file dates back to 1991, back when Wordstar was still relevant. Like BRIEF and WordPerfect they have gone the way of the dodo.

I still remember having to use WordPerfect back in the day; but without the little cardboard printout you stuck to the keyboard's F-row it was almost impossible to use.

<comment><USER3> That might convince me to finally switch from vi. Wordstar was one of the first programs I used and the similar keyboard shortcuts used by Borland probably didn't hurt when I started programming. I'm sure all that muscle memory is long forgotten by now... ^k^b, ^k^k. I vaguely remember that as how to define a selection block, but I'm not sure I got it right.

<comment><USER2> There's nothing stopping you from customizing Emacs to do what you like with keybindings. You can use either BRIEF or WordStar as a jumping off point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Joe's Own Editor still mimics WordStar for those whose fingers never re- learned: [http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/](http://joe- editor.sourceforge.net/)

</comment><comment><USER5> This has been known by GRRM fans for quite some time. It's funny what bits of trivia become relevant again as the show finds new audiences.

The reality is, of course, that WordStar doesn't do anything special that there's not a modern replacement for. With the wide variety of software out there available to write documents, I'm sure that there's something that would word as well or better.

But the thing is, GRRM isn't interested in finding a replacement. He knows what works for him. And that's fine.

<comment><USER6> Also I guess we would want him to write instead of spending his time getting used to other tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A friend of mine is a published author who wrote his books on a cramped 9" netbook during his daily commute on the train.

It's not about the tool, it's about the author.

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems like DOS running in a VM might be a better choice, so that you could run it on a machine with auto-backups.

<comment><USER9> I was wondering how old his disk drive had to be.

Edit: "To all of you worried about my backing up my fiction. I write on a DOS machine that is physically separate from my Windows machine and has no connection to the internet. It cannot get a virus. Assuming someone was writing viruses for WordStar 4.0, which I think unlikely. It also has a built in mirrored drive, so everything I write is automatically copied to two hard drives. I back up frequently to floppy disks, less frequently to CD/ROM, every blue moon to a Zip drive. So I think I am pretty well backed up. The one vulnerability I have is that all these backups share the same physical location, so if my house burned down, I'd be screwed. I have looked into offsite backup systems, yes, but unfortunately none of them will work with DOS/ WordStar. (And no, don't ask, I'm not going to send any of you a disk for "safekeeping," I'm on to that trick)."

[http://grrm.livejournal.com/83679.html](http://grrm.livejournal.com/83679.html)

<comment><USER10> Someone should teach him about encryption, then he can encrypt stuff, back it up to many optical media, and send copies to his editor and publisher and lawyer and maybe keep one in a bank.

That's a sub optimal solution but it's better tuan what he's got now.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask Startups: Is Employee Retention Overrated? - <AUTHOR> http://scale.cc/

<comment><USER2> Speaking about hackers, retention is probably _underrated_.

I have personally observed that a tremendous amount of software knowledge and understanding simply walks out the door when a really great designer/hacker leaves a team. The ability to simply ask the hacker who built some part of the function a quick question about the "big picture" rather than reading through lines (sometimes many, many lines) of code is a costly loss.

My extremely limited experience with acquisitions has been that employees at the acquired company are given large time-based retention bonuses. This is a market recognition of _employee_ value. In some cases, this is kind of a waste - not everybody at a company is equally valuable. But there are always a couple of hackers on board who built the original codebase and you need to hang onto them if possible.

Of course, I've also seen companies acquired in what appears to be a strategic move to simply acquire the customer base too.

I believe the idea of employee value is at the heart of what Y-combinator is trying to do - recognize that some _people_ can produce software that is capable of creating greater value than having that same hacker sit in a cubicle writing the next drop-down menu item in MS Word/Quicken/Oracle.

<comment><USER3> Further, there is always the domain-specific knowledge that walks out the door. We can read source code and eventually understand it, but the reasons behind the algorithms might be the result of years of experience in the domain. That's not easy to replace quickly.

The core team at my employer has been together for two and half years, and four members of the seven person team have been together since day one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like this is taking Zuckerberg's quotes out of context. I watched that interview, and more got the impression that he was simply pointing out the reality of the situation. Of course Facebook wants to keep great employees, and of course they try their best to do so.

The problem is that they know that great employees in a startup are, by definition, the people who always want to be working on the next big thing, and nobody is ever the next big thing for long. Facebook knows they took a lot of talent from Google when the next big thing moniker shifted their way, and they know the next big thing after Facebook (maybe Twitter, maybe someone not yet in business) is going to do the same to them. There's simply no avoiding it. You can only IPO once.

I didn't take his quote at all to mean they don't want to retain good employees or that you shouldn't bother. He's just pointing out that to a certain extent that's impossible and it's best to just admit that and work around it.

Also if I'm not mistaken Zappos is based in Las Vegas, and keeping programmers around there is a lot easier than SV.

<comment><USER5> I think the postulation that most programmers like to hop jobs is incorrect. It's always been quite a hassle for me. Programmers, like others, prefer steady income. They prefer steady insurance and easy taxes, and all of the other benefits of staying at a job.

Facebook, afaict, is losing talent because its management is out-of-touch, overbearing, and ineffective. Google is losing talent because it's well on its way to becoming just another corporate entity.

People want to work somewhere fun and small. This usually describes startups. Google is now huge and is suffering some symptoms of that hugeness, and it's driving developers who were attracted to Google's startup culture out.

I think that it has much more to do with an acceptable atmosphere than "the next big thing".

<comment><USER6> They also have an open office in what is essentially a warehouse. It must be deafeningly loud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Given two companies, one with above average turnover and one with below average turnover, What can we say? I think we can say very little without more investigation. The high turnover place may be terrible. On the other hand, it may be unafraid to hire really great people. It may try really really hard to keep them. It may be a tremendous victory for that company when a great person stays.

The other company may be very cautious about hiring. It may pass over great people that might leave, choosing instead to hire average to below-average people that have fewer options and little ambition.

There are other explanations, of course. I'm just pointing out that Mark and Tony might both be right, or neither might be right. It's all in the day-to- day execution of hiring people and managing them and running the business. Turnover alone is neither good nor bad in and of itself.

<comment><USER8> They also said those were their _goals_. They didn't mention their actual turnover. So while Zappos may have lower turnover than Facebook, it's because they're optimizing for that condition. Zappos is explicitly creating a culture of longevity.

<comment><USER7> I agree that Zappos is optimizing for low turnover. I cannot comment on Zappos specifically because I don't know them, I'm just pointing out that _some_ companies optimize for low turnover in a very poor way, so I suggested that _how_ a company achieves its turnover is more important than the turnover itself.

I suspect we are in violent agreement on this, just saying it in different ways.

<comment><USER8> Violent agreement indeed! I said also because I was adding to, expanding on your point :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Better link: [http://scale.cc/2009/10/30/ask-startups-is-employee- retentio...](http://scale.cc/2009/10/30/ask-startups-is-employee-retention- overrated/)

</comment><comment><USER10> As a current facebook employee, who is in no way empowered to officially speak for the company, I would not be in too big a hurry to extrapolate Mark's observations out to infinity. Facebook is putting together one of the very best software teams in the industry, and trust me, we care about keeping the band together. From my perspective in the trenches, facebook is doing a better-than-fine job of it.

</comment><comment><USER11> I had a great conversation with another small business owner the other day. She runs a small design firm that he wants to stay small and nimble. She encourages turnover because more senior employees demand higher salaries and better benefits, and upsets the overall balance of power for such a small firm. So 3-4 years is the longest they let anyone stay, unless they're on a partnership track (which one staffer currently is).

Obviously the dynamic with is different for hackers, and especially those working on a single product over time, but it was a refreshing perspective.

</comment><comment><USER12> My guess is that the answer is an unsurprising "It depends".

A high turnover can (emph. _can_ ) facilitate an upbeat, fast culture. Someone comes in, gives his fresh perspective on that particular problem-set and moves on. I sincerely doubt that Facebook doesn't full-heartedly encourages retention for key employees to ensure stable operation, testing and so on.

<comment><USER5> What you've described is called "consulting". It can be useful occasionally, but not very often. You don't hire on full-time employees as consultants without specifying that, it's a recipe for bad things. Employees expect a steady and fulfilling career; consultants consult, employees are employed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook is so backwards. Everything I hear about Facebook as a corporate entity bodes very poorly.

Employee retention is one of the number one most important things in any company, especially software companies, and double-especially in software startups.

A lot of executives and executive-types have absolutely no comprehension of the real cost of training a new programmer. If you have any kind of complex codebase, it's going to take _several months_ before a new hire can acquire ideal productivity -- and no, pair programming doesn't make this possible in a day and a half.

Startups have more than enough problems as it is getting something off the ground even in cases where all the founders stay with it all the way from concept to launch to profitability. Many startups whose original teams are intact die out before they become profitable.

Changing the lineup is just going to make things that much less likely, especially if your tech guy drops, because the tech guy knows all of the ins and outs of your actual product, which is probably undocumented and messy, and it will take a good programmer a long time to acquire the same level of familiarity with the product.

There are times when you don't have any other options to cut someone loose, but I would avoid it wherever feasible. Your company's essence is its employees; they run the company, their philosophies, management, and implementations are delivered to your customers, and they understand your domain, your products, and your accounts -- this isn't just intuitive knowledge that any qualified person (in whatever profession; accounting, sales, etc.) can waltz in and pick up, and retaining that wealth of information is critical to any successful business.

At least at most of the places I've worked, poor retention occurs when there is poor communication, disregard for an employee's cares and well-being, or a combination of the both. I don't understand why so many managers and executives have such a complex and insist on abusing subordinates, but it should be seen that doing so gets you nothing but angry ex-employees and ever- diminishing market share, relevance, and cashflow.

Fast turnover is such especial death for programming departments, and fast turnover almost always indicates serious systemic issues in the company.

Zuckerberg is crazy to think that this is legitimate strategy; it must be that he has seen the retention rates at Facebook and is now saving face by claiming it's part of some overarching corporate strategy so that the unprofitable Facebook can keep getting funding to maintain and purchase its servers.

<comment><USER13> This is not to mention that kick ass programmers that leave can end up being competitors. Any employee that's valuable knows the ins and outs of your company/software (what's good about it, where the limitations are, what customers want/don't want). letting them walk away is a risk.

Setting up an environment where employees often walk is even worse, i.e. where there is rampant "poor communication, disregard for an employee's cares and well-being, or a combination of the both". I've been there and watched great programmers leave unhappily. It causes morale issues and leaves a huge hole in institutional knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Simple idea. Simple answer:

If your employee kicks ass, retain them. If your employee is average, let them go.

<comment><USER15> This is the netflix mentality, right? Don't keep anything less than stellar?</comment></comment>


Study material for tech interviews - <AUTHOR> http://www.geeksforgeeks.org <comment><USER2> I recently did a batch of interviews at a handful of companies. The advice I got from the best programmers I know was that you shouldn't bother preparing for interviews, other than, perhaps, spending a few hours skimming an algorithms textbook to make sure that stuff is fresh. I wasn't sure about that advice at the time. In retrospect, I agree [1].

80% of the coding questions I got were really simple; things you'd expect any college kid who'd been through a basic CS curriculum to be able to answer cold. Not having just taken an algorithms class, stuff like that took a bit of thought. 20% were things like "implement coroutines in C using setjmp and longjmp" or "implement a regular expression matcher". How can you cram for that? Sure, you can cram for any specific question, but, given the breadth of the question space, your only hope is to understand things well and be able to reason out whatever comes up.

As far as I could tell, being better prepared was negatively correlated with getting an offer. I did well in interviews where I was totally clueless and had to reason things out from first principles. Conversely, I had an interview at Palantir where I heard the question I was being asked, so I said that. My interviewer asked me to quickly sketch the answer. When I did, he asked me another question. After repeating that process a few times he gave up and asked me a simple design question. Apparently, I failed that interview so badly that I got kicked out before lunch (interviews there are normally all day). In general, having heard the question before (and telling my interviewer), or having a flash of insight and being able to write down the answer without thinking about it seem to be taken as negative signals.

I was surprised by that until talking to a friend of mine who said "the interview process is this largely protocol driven song and dance where you're supposed to scratch your head and be wowed by the technical question and then slowly and painfully make incremental progress on a solution while the interviewer can feel smug about knowing it all along and maybe they can help you along the way. If you blurt out a good approximation in the first thirty seconds, that ruins the whole courtship." That's not true everywhere, but it seems to be true at most places.

There are, of course, non-coding questions. Those seem even less useful to cram for. You might be able to impress someone if you happen to know a lg(lg(n)) data structure you can use instead of a red-black tree, but most non-algorithms questions are about thinking on your feet; just having lots of knowledge won't help you there.

[1] This assumes that you have a solid background in CS fundamentals. If not, interview prep has a very high payoff.

<comment><USER3> This has been my strategy for a while, and it's always worked for me. I never study for interviews, and I can usually find jobs.

In my experience, technical questions typically fall into two categories. The first is trivia about a programming language or other tool. The only people who need to "cram" for these are people who lied on their resume. Everybody else will answer these questions pretty easily just from working with the tools and having hands on experience. These are weed out questions to keep people honest.

The second category is to see how the candidate thinks about problems and solving them. It's not helpful to "cram" for these because the problem space is too large, and it would defeat the point anyway. If a company wanted people who've memorized "Coding Interviews For Dummies," they would just put that in the job requirements. In reality, the job they're hiring for doesn't have cookie cutter problems and solutions, and they want to see how the interviewee will work through a problem to find a solution. Knowing the answer to these in advance can actually hurt because it doesn't show them what they're looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How about we collectively protest these kinds of interview questions. I vote that instead of answering questions, we ask difficult ones to our interviewers. When they protest, we explain "Just making sure I won't be working with idiots".

Remember folks, these companies are getting more from you then you are from them.

<comment><USER5> _> Just making sure I won't be working with idiots._

I think the the interviewer (or company) would probably take this as an insult.

But I do agree with you in that these types of interview questions are pointless. Spitting back an answer verbatim demonstrates nothing.

A neat approach that I've seen people use is to take a you-should-know-this concept such as the merging part of merge sort and put a twist in it, so it isn't a simple spit-the-answer-back, but different enough to require some thought.

<comment><USER4> "probably take this as an insult."

Yet isn't it surprising perspective employees don't feel the same? Or maybe we do but we suck it up to get the job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And if you want to see if you could literally, truly derive a working solution to any of these puzzles in a realtime interview environment, I make a tool for that: [https://coderpad.io](https://coderpad.io)

It also works for administering the interview!

</comment><comment><USER7> All of these examples are in C , is it common for interviews to be conducted in C for major tech companies (assuming the job is not a C programming role)?

<comment><USER8> Generally the candidate picks their best language. Personally, I would never pick C because there is too much minutiae and not enough meat.

<comment><USER9> "I would never pick C because there is too much minutiae and not enough meat"

There's really not much minutiae at all when it comes to C. C++, sure, I'd agree, but not C.

You do have to be be pretty comfortable with how processors and memory work if you're going to be answering questions in C, but that aside the language's syntax, keyword usage and standard library are all quite small.

<comment><USER8> You spend half the time allocating memory, deallocating memory and checking error return values. I gave a couple hundred interviews at twitter, people that picked C wasted a ton of time not solving the problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tic-tac-toe.js: redux pattern in plain JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ramonvictor/tic-tac-toe-js-redux-pattern-in-plain-javascript-fffe37f7c47a <comment><AUTHOR> Check out this study case to get some insights about Redux internal architecture and how to apply its principles in vanilla javascript.</comment>


Show HN: My HTML5 MMORPG - <AUTHOR> http://rpg.mo.ee

<comment><USER2> My impressions:

1\. Canvas isn't centered, loading font is boring.

2\. Traditional sign-up? Meh. It also seems it makes you a new account if you misspell your old username. At least ask for confirmation first.

3\. Badly-aligned Times New Roman? Really?

4\. Graphics look decent.

5\. I didn't identify with the bag of gold as inventory. Maybe that's just me.

6\. Drop-down is sort of annoying. Take a look at Amazon's magic drop-down [1].

7\. Tutorials that actually let you do things are good. Especially the fact that you can talk to the tutorial guys as many times as you need. Reminds me a bit of Runescape's tutorial... but then I never got through that.

8\. No walking animation? Hum.

9\. Clicking on the Makeover Guy caused me to click on the square behind him. I had to click his square to talk to him. I don't think there's really a completely unambiguous way to do it, though; good that it's settled here instead of later.

10\. Makeover should be left/right arrows around a characteristic.

11\. Pixel-art does not work when I can't see the pixels. I can't make out my guy's face.

12\. Cool map so far — pretty cohesive, in fact — but the tile-disappearing and reappearing is somewhat jolting.

13\. How are all these people standing on water? Why can't I do that?

14\. I can't read the numbers on the fish merchant's tiles. Use white-on-black text, and make it a tad larger.

15\. How do I _attempt_ to cook? What exactly happened in the event of failure? I dropped my frying pan into the fire or something?

16\. Level up in cooking, woo! Make this feel like more of an achievement, with animation and a flashing up arrow and whatnot, and it should help to hook players.

17\. Don't these rats have any sort of movement AI? Rats don't just sit there. Hitting rats might as well be hitting statues.

18\. Why can't I hit this other guy? I want to hit him.

19\. "Entire mining guide can be found on forums?" NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT! This breaks you out of the immersive experience. Provide it if you must, but not in the tutorial message box.

20\. Random CAPTCHA? Oh lawd what is this I don't have all day to spend staring at my guy hitting a rock. Especially if I don't hear a notification sound.

21\. I currently have -1 penalty points... what? What does this even mean? Is this XP? Should I be thankful that I'm not being penalized? I can't imagine a player being thankful for that.

22\. What's a mould?

23\. Why is this furnace using _all_ of my clay? I only ever selected one! Cooking did this too — I looked away for a moment and all my fish were cooked. That must be the most dangerous way to cook.

At this point I'm kinda bored. What am I supposed to be doing in the game? If there's a goal — killing the lich lord, saving the princess, it doesn't really matter — I can see all my tutorialing as a ramp up to that. I'll actually be excited that I'm leveling up because then I can do something with those levels. Without it I don't actually know that I'll get to do anything. Perhaps that's just me being impatient; there are, after all, plenty of other players.

Overall though it looks like you have a fairly engaging and functional game. The amount of effort that went into making this must have been unreasonably large. I think that with polish and a bit more engagement you could have a game that people actually play regularly. But if you do: what makes your game better than any other game? Are there cooler battle systems? In-depth alchemy? An artificially-simulated NPC economy? Government? There has to be at least one major thing that no one else has.

[1]: [http://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons- mega-...](http://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega- dropdown)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the late response, I thought my topic had died and nobody clicked/replied like it has happened so far. Thanks for so thorough review. I surely got some inspiration from it and will do fixes where possible or try to explain things more to players. The game is still in beta so things do change often.</comment></comment>


Why America Stopped Being a Startup Nation - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-20/why-america-stopped-being-a-startup-nation <comment><USER2> Two reasons. (1) Until Obamacare, health insurance could be almost impossible to get for a small business and (2) the 401K and IRA programs have drained money away from Main street towards Wall Street.

Before tax-advantaged savings you would save money in such a way that you could tap it to start a business. Now people disinvest in their own businesses and subsidize big businesses by investing in their 401K. No wonder why a few people have it all.

</comment><comment><USER3> _America_ has never been a nation in the first place. It's two _continents_ , each with many countries.</comment>


Ask HN: What was the name of the beta app enabling easy use of LXC? - iso8859-1

On HN a couple of weeks ago. I think it was related to Joyent or some company like that. <comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps it was docker.io, the linux container engine? <http://www.docker.io/>

<comment><USER2> Yes! Thank you so much! :D</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you think the successor to Flash will be? - <AUTHOR> It seems like we are in a dark age in terms of web applets, which depending on your point of view could be great or horrible.<p>With Chrome dropping support for Flash in January, and there being no universal support for any other standard yet, I was curious to see if anyone had any guesses as to what the next might be. <comment><USER2> I never liked having to install Flash plug-ins. And I hated all the gunk that was created with Flash. So I quarantined a single older notebook to run the few Flash dependent apps that I needed to use from time to time. Ok, so much for my bias.

Technology has moved on a great deal since Flash was first released to address the shortcomings of the HTML standards of the day. We now have WASM, HTML5 and ES6. For games there are both 2D, 3D canvas operations and SVG. From an infrastructure point of view, support is far better than Flash is able to offer in 2020. I expect that authoring tools will catch-up and surpass what was possible with Flash tooling.

</comment><comment><USER3> The successor of Flash is JavaScript and HTML5.

</comment><comment><USER4> There won't be a successor.</comment>


Light stopped completely for a minute inside a crystal - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/162289-light-stopped-completely-for-a-minute-inside-a-crystal-the-basis-of-quantum-memory

<comment><USER2> Significant discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6101970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6101970)

Submissions of other sources for this story here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6109277](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6109277)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6111786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6111786)</comment>


BitFury Pulls 1PH/s of Mining Power from Ghash.io Amid Bitcoin Community Uproar - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindesk.com/bitfury-pulls-power-ghash-community-uproar/

<comment><AUTHOR> _" Ghash.io accounted for roughly 48% of the bitcoin network's total hashing power"_

As time goes on, >51% control over hashing power becomes inevitable due to specialization of technology.

By the way, [http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/](http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/) is going completely nuts right now over this. The frontpage has about a dozen selfposts of people freaking out about a 51% attack.

<comment><USER2> _As time goes on, >51% control over hashing power becomes inevitable due to specialization of technology._

Why? Which technology?</comment></comment>


Image Scaling Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/05/scaling-convnets/

<comment><USER2> I wonder how this approach compare to upscaling via IFS (i.e. "fractal compression"-like techniques). Although the underlying modelling is very different, the fundamental idea seems very similar - learn vectors from the image, apply (possibly a mixture of) them at a different scale. The results certainly look superficially similar.</comment>


GitHub Talk on Social Coding at Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=prestonwerner-github

<comment><USER2> Wow, I didn't know about the github gem. It looks incredibly useful.

edit: ProjectPlus for TextMate also looks neat. The one thing I missed when switching from SVN to Git was SVNMate (which was apparently the predecessor of ProjectPlus?)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Dav Glass isn't mic'd during the intro - I promise the sound improves.

<comment><USER3> Fun finally putting a face to your nick :) At the start of your talk you talked a little bit about reviews and even mention a few things such as how many companies only send emails or that you can work in a branch without having to push it to the central repository. This is one area of Git and distributed revision control that I can't praise enough. It raises the code review bar to a whole new level while making it less work. The best example was how with svn/perforce etc when reviewing patches almost no one ever applied the patch to see if it even compiled let alone worked. With Git I nearly always do this because it is so easy. This an other things really improve the quality of the main repository on a day to day basis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was in the audience for this talk. Great job guys!</comment>


'Sorry for lives lost': Boeing admits faulty system part of 737 MAX crashs - <AUTHOR> http://www.boeing.com/commercial/737max/737-max-update.page#/message <comment><USER2> I hope Boeing learns and rectify's this issue with haste!</comment>


On Google, a Political Mystery That's All Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970203347104578099122530080836-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwNDEwNDQyWj.html?mod=wsj_valetleft_email

<comment><USER2> This is an actually interesting topic (i.e., that Google personalizes search) that is spun in a political context to generate pageviews. In the spin, the interesting element is actually lost, because after introducing the topic, the journalist digs no deeper and gives the audience no greater insight than what they might derive from a better-written headline.

The fact that personalized search applies to political topics is unsurprising and probably reflects that Google is data-driven. The fact that Romney doesn't trigger the same personalization as Obama probably reflects that, until recently, his name was virtually never searched for (relatively).[1]

By introducing Mr. Weinberg, the author gives us hope that we will learn something about the nature of personalized search and its implications, but I think that HNers would be much more satisfied to re-read his blog entries on the topic.[2]

[1] = [http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney&...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney&geo=US&cmpt=q)

[2] = [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/08/how-do-you- compl...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/08/how-do-you-completely- de-personalize-google-results.html)

<comment><USER3> I'm planning on blogging a bit on this particular topic tomorrow. If you have any questions, please let me know and I'll try to address them.

I don't think the gTrends argument works though (see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4741590>). Most of the results inserted are super-recent (and so I expect the recency of the trends data -- like the last 90 days -- to dominate). Of course it is all a black box so who knows.

Some of the more interesting things to me are:

\--you can't reliably de-personalize (as you cited).

\--the variation in results across our study was great.

\--variation for signed out (even incognito) users was not much different from signed in users.

<comment><USER2> It would be vaguely interesting to know from study participants how unique their browser is.[1] Mine appeared to yield the same result whether in incognito mode or not, but I can't really see Google using this approach.

Your point about Google trends is counterintuitive but evidence-supported, which makes it particularly interesting. It may well be that they are looking at outcome measures after search personalization, and abandoning personalizations that yield no results. Or perhaps a certain volume is required over time for a particular query before triggering an automated personalization trial. As you say, it's a black box, so who knows.

[1] = <https://panopticlick.eff.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know why they bother putting 'Mystery' in the headline.

<http://www.google.ca/trends/explore#q=obama,%20romney>

Surprise, the incumbent president is far more popular than the challenger, in terms of historic searches. There's no mystery, this is somewhere between a fluff political piece and an advertisement for Google's new search tech.

Come on WSJ, you can do better.

edit: A bigger mystery; does anyone know why these searches are more popular in Africa than the United States? The top five countries for Obama searches are:

1) Burundi 2) Guinea 3) Rwanda 4) Sierra Leone 5) United States

Meanwhile, Romney is pretty much only relevant in the US.

<comment><USER3> That's actually not true. Here's the past 90 days in the US for Obama (blue), Romney (red) and taxes (yellow): [http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama,+romney,+taxes&...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama,+romney,+taxes&date=today+3-m&cmpt=q&geo=US)

If you restrict to just US news searches (as many of the inserted results are newsy), it is similar: [http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney%2C%...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=obama%2C%20romney%2C%20taxes&geo=US&date=today%203-m&gprop=news&cmpt=q)

Actually a lot of election-related queries, most of which searched less than Romney and Obama transform results in this manner, e.g. social security, health care, abortion, taxes, ohio, election and many others. Just not Romney: [http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=romney%2C%20social%20...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=romney%2C%20social%20security%2C%20taxes%2C%20health%20care%2C%20abortion&date=today%203-m&cmpt=q)

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure if I follow the second part. Adding more comma-separated words doesn't do anything to the other lines, this is just an overlay of multiple graphs. Adding or removing 'taxes' doesn't do anything.

<comment><USER3> Sorry for not being clear (was also trying to not be verbose!). All it shows is that all those terms were searched a lot less than Romney for the past 90 days, and yet they all were found to alter subsequent search results after searching them (unlike Romney).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Alternate Headline: DuckDuckGo chief, trying to rustle up more users from Google personalization-fear-baiting, spoon feeds article to WSJ.

What'd I miss?

<comment><USER6> Is there evidence of this?

<comment><USER7> Sure, read the last few paragraphs of this Journal article. The reporter is up front about her source: "Mr. Weinberg brought the discrepancy to the Journal's attention.""

""In September, Gabriel Weinberg, founder and chief executive of tiny Duck Duck Go Inc., which markets itself as a privacy-protecting search engine, stumbled across the "you recently searched for" phenomenon in a study he conducted of Google's personalization efforts. Mr. Weinberg, whose site is based in Paoli, Pa., asked 131 of its users to search Google for several keywords at 2 p.m. Eastern time on Sept. 2: "Obama," "abortion" and "gun control." His testers received a wide variety of different results that appeared to be personalized by location and other factors.

Mr. Weinberg also noticed that some testers received results labeled "you recently searched for Obama," and discovered that he couldn't replicate the same label when searching for Romney. Mr. Weinberg brought the discrepancy to the Journal's attention.""

There's no shame in running an interesting story that's brought to your attention by someone with vested interests.

For example, notorious fraudster Barry Minkow dug up a list of all the executives in publicly traded corporations who lied about their college degrees and gave that information to the WSJ after short-selling the companies, <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122652836844922165.html>.

Win-win -- the Journal got an important news tip, and he made some money on the bounce.

Unfortunately for Minkow, he couldn't resist going after _just_ bad companies and ended up in prison for defrauding a home-building company, [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190346110457646...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903461104576460033311796732.html).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> WSJ is really turning into Murdoch's mouthpiece. The breaking news is that at standing president of 4 years has different search results than his opponent?

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's how to easily de-personalize your google experience

1\. Disable cookies for encrypted.google.com

2\. Set the default search engine to: [https://encrypted.google.com/search?&q=%s](https://encrypted.google.com/search?&q=%s)

Edit: Sorry, de-personalize, not anonymize.

<comment><USER3> Anonymize != de-personalize, and this doesn't do either, unfortunately -- though is a good start at protecting yourself.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, meant to say depersonalize. Care to expand why this doesn't work? Just ran the same test, and I see the exact same results.

<comment><USER3> Yes, what you said sounds plausible and is indeed intuitive, but we've found it empirically to be untrue.

In fact, on fresh private mode browsing (cookies cleared) when people searched for the same result at the same time, we still saw significant variation in results, even in the same country and on non-location results.

<comment><USER10> This may have nothing to do with personalization. [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/search-evaluation- at-...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/search-evaluation-at- google.html) "We also make use of experiments, in which small fractions of queries are shown results from alternative search approaches."

Many small experiments can lead to differences for a reasonably large fraction of queries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This TED talk does a good job explaining the concepts of what is happening in this article.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...](http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> "...In the hands of a human, decisions like these might be viewed as biased. For a Google algorithm, they are simply a matter of numbers..."

I hate to continue the political thread, but "biased" doesn't quite cut it. Algorithms don't automatically make everything magic. There is a structural issue that just saying "it's the algorithm" doesn't explain or address.

No doubt the data leans that way because Obama has been a searchable term for longer. This just leads to the natural question: should incumbents be given extra chances at a target audience simply because they've generated a lot more content? I don't think so, but I find myself arguing with a mathematical formula. The nature of the social value of making democratic decisions is different from the nature of the personal value of targeting results.

Weird.

<comment><USER13> "should incumbents be given extra chances at a target audience simply because they've generated a lot more content?"

Since the incumbent has already campaigned the previous election, fairness dictates that he shouldn't be allowed to campaign at all against the challenger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > In the hands of a human, decisions like these might be viewed as biased. For > a Google algorithm, they are simply a matter of numbers.

This is pure nonsense. Algorithms are written by humans and are just as biased as their creators.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I prevent duplicates in a crowd-sourced database of media titles? - <AUTHOR>

For example, http://whatshouldireadnext.com/ will ask you to enter the name of a book you liked, and a list of books will pop up. If there are multiple entries, it will recommend selecting the top one. That'll work, but is there a more elegant way? <comment><USER2> soundex or another method to group similarly spelled words to assign a confidence of whether they should be merged.

Then, keep a list of the misspellings to assign future misspelled entries to the proper spelling.</comment>


Ask HN: Take-home project interview results == Final step? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN, I recently interviewed with a company in the Bay Area that specializes in remote work and need some opinions on a practice that borders on, in my opinion, unethical behavior and unprofessionalism.
After a quick exchange of messages on AngelList and a phone conversation prefacing the coding challenge, I completed the assignment over the weekend, and today, I went to their office for a brief 2-hour on-site interview to present my solution, meet the team, and have a chat with the CEO--no lunch.
From my experience with take-home project-style interviewing processes, you are more or less in the final round after you present your solution and go onsite, without any further need to validate my coding competency. However after I presented, the CTO of this particular company told me there is yet another final take home project that involves implementing a couple features on their dev environment.
My questions are: For companies who employ the take-home project interviewing style, is this additional step common practice? If not, do you think it's worth salvaging the situation to see if the CTO will understand that I had already sunk a lot of time interviewing for this particular company--or should I just run? <comment><USER2> This is an interesting thing they are doing to you. It is like they are testing you, but it can be seen as them taking advantage of you.

Maybe they are testing you to see if you can handle it, but most companies would give you little meaningless projects, but to have you work on company projects seems very odd.

I had to go through 3 months of intensive training AFTER I was hired before my former boss would even let me code within his beloved software program.

I know some companies, like Google and Facebook, spend hours interviewing.. initial phone interviews, flying people out to the headquarters, and giving them various tests, so its not unreasonable to know that they are trying to test your skills to see if you are a perfect match, especially if they are giving you the opportunity to work remotely. They are seeing if you will actually do the projects and complete them in a timely manner. Trusting someone to work from home and complete projects on time is a big deal.

If you are worried, try and research the company on www.glassdoor.com.

You could also just bluntly ask if they are testing you with intent to hire or compensate you for the time you have already given them.

If they tell you not to bother coming back, at least you won't be wasting anymore time there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. I wouldn't mind another take home assignment that was a meaningless project that they would discard, but they are asking me to essentially do some work for free.

I ended up sending an email of my concerns and am wiling to forego this opportunity if needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If the company culture doesn't suit you, that's o.k. To me, the bigger cultural disconnect is over going to lunch because it relates to social norms. The second take home is more or less a confirmation of your disconnect and that's why it is framed in terms of ethics and professionalism.

People struggle with social norms when it comes to remote work. It takes extra effort to treat remote workers well and so it is not uncommon for people to take a pass on it.

Good luck.</comment>


Ask HN: Where I can find the latest security exploits? - <AUTHOR>

What are the best security sites that lists systems security exploits?<p>Thanks? <comment><USER2> Wrong sort of hacker. We build stuff people want, not break it.

<comment><USER3> I was unable to understand "secure coding practices" (beyond buffer overflows and sql escaping anyway) until I started examining real exploits to understand them. Why do you assume that the OP wants only to break things?

<comment><USER2> _Why do you assume that the OP wants only to break things?_

Because he's new here, and when new people wander in here looking for security vulnerabilities, it's usually because they've misunderstood what the site is about.

Also, he specifically asked for the _latest_ security exploits -- if your goal is to learn rather than attack, it doesn't matter if a vulnerability has been fixed already. (In fact, it's better if it has, since that way you can see both how the attack works and how to prevent it.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't consider myself "new" here, I've been reading the discussions here for months, and I do understand what the site is all about. I do understand that "HN" isn't about breaking systems, which I'm not trying to do.

Have asked about the "latest" security exploits, I'm not trying to "attack", I just want to know "modern" security exploits I can try on my own system. I'll appreciate it if you tell me about new security exploits along with their fixes.

Thanks and sorry again for the inconvenience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're really interested in security and not just looking for 1337 5ki11z, start here:

<http://www.google.com>

<http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1>

<http://cve.mitre.org/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Bugtraq and vuln-dev for the more whitehat side, irc and zeroday forums (often invite only) for the blackhat side.</comment>


Pacman in HTMTL5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.romancortes.com/ficheros/pacman_css.html

<comment><USER2> What part of it is HTML5? <http://i.v3n.us/8YeR>

EDIT: This is just plain 'ol CSS & JavaScript like we've been using for years. Unlike this implementation: <http://arandomurl.com/2010/07/25/html5-pacman.html>

<comment><USER3> i closed the source tab at <?xml...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is this, pacifist Pacman? I can't eat the ghosts! (And they can't eat me.)</comment>


Why North Korea wants nuclear weapons - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykYRsmIQkyw <comment><USER2> Perhaps this?

"What hardly any Americans know or remember," University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings writes in his book "The Korean War: A History," "is that we carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties."

How many Americans know that "over a period of three years or so," to quote Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, "we killed off … 20 percent of the population"?

Twenty. Percent. For a point of comparison, the Nazis exterminated 20 percent of Poland's pre-World War II population. According to LeMay, "We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea."

Every. Town. More than 3 million civilians are believed to have been killed in the fighting, the vast majority of them in the north.

[https://theintercept.com/2017/05/03/why-do-north-koreans- hat...](https://theintercept.com/2017/05/03/why-do-north-koreans-hate-us-one- reason-they-remember-the-korean-war/)

The war against the United States, more than any other single factor, gave North Koreans a collective sense of anxiety and fear of outside threats that would continue long after the war's end.

[http://apjjf.org/-Charles-K.-Armstrong/3460/article.html](http://apjjf.org/-Charles-K.-Armstrong/3460/article.html)</comment>


Why the limbal ring around the iris is so attractive - <AUTHOR> http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/love-sex-and-babies/201104/how-big-is-your-limbal-ring

<comment><USER2> As usual, Japanese schoolgirls have picked up on this before anyone else:

"Long ago, Japanese schoolgirls discovered the edge a limbal ring can give you by wearing "limbal ring" contact lenses. They make the eye look bigger and more defined."

My question is: Who do these schoolgirls get their information from?</comment>


IKEA dives into world of Artificial Intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.thememo.com/2017/05/02/ikea-ai-survey-ikea-artificial-intelligence-ikea-smart-home-furniture/ <comment><USER2> I really enjoyed the video presentation in the Do you speak Human? survey [1]. However I was expecting the survey to not present the information as black and white, yes and no. For many of the questions, I wanted something that was in- between. I'm worried that the available choices will affect the results.

It's a little worrying that people think an AI should "reflect your values and worldview." Maybe a more appropriate approach to modeling artificial intelligence would be how they are described in Iain M. Banks' the Culture series. [2]

> Although drones are artificial, the parameters that prescribe their minds > are not rigidly constrained, and sentient drones are full individuals, with > their own personalities, opinions and quirks.

1\. [http://doyouspeakhuman.com](http://doyouspeakhuman.com) 2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Artificial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Artificial)

<comment><USER3> _It 's a little worrying that people think an AI should "reflect your values and worldview."_

That's all that the people who are scared of AGI have been banging on forever. How do you give AI "human values?" It's non-sensical.

<comment><USER4> There's a couple of ways of interpreting that phrase. One is as you mention - how do we explain to a superhuman AI that turning the entire solar system into paperclips or biogas or whatever is actually bad? The other is the perception in some groups that AI should believe what they believe, regardless of whether that belief is borne out by observed facts.

(A recent example was a system which predicted recidivism rates among ex-cons, which predicted based on its observed data that a particular demographic was much more likely to re-offend. Rather than asking accepting the result and trying to solve the problem, there was an outcry that the program was 'wrong' and must have been fed biased data.)

<comment><USER5> You could argue that kind of outcry is less about legitimate belief, and more about political skepticism and/or suppression of demographically inconvenient truths.

<comment><USER6> While some of those may be "inconvenient truths", punishment based on race is, strictly speaking, illegal in the US. Proxies for race (such as where they live) aren't much better.

Another part of the problem is the historical over-policing of minorities (particularly blacks and hispanics) in the US and the lower economic class. It's easy to view them as more likely to be recidivists until you realize that the neighborhoods they're going back to have more than normal police presence and they're more likely to be picked up for "nuisance" crimes like jaywalking, public drunkenness, and loitering. This will skew the numbers substantially in these sorts of models when the police are (largely) not applying the same standards to white people or those from higher economic classes (or whose neighborhoods are less tolerant of such behavior so it's not seen as often to begin with).

<comment><USER5> wrt considering AI systems and the future, the current legal system, or even an American one seem irrelevant.

> Proxies for race (such as where they live)

a proxy is only a proxy if there is bad intent, otherwise it is just correlation.

> This will skew the numbers substantially

Only if your analysis is as simplistic - otherwise you can afford to look into the reasons the discrepancy exists.

You suggest over-policing, or higher police scrutiny, results in more arrests - why does it not result in fewer "nuisance" crimes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _It poses questions that refer to how AI might find purpose in your home > like "should your AI fulfil your needs before you ask?" and "should your AI > prevent you from making mistakes?"_

Those two questions seem like they are worded to elicit a positive answer. They don't give any hint who exactly "mistake" is defined and how the AI can be sure you actually have a need.

Why not use more neutral formulations - e.g. such as:

\- should an AI perform certain actions on its own? \- should an AI in certain situations prevent you from performing an action?

<comment><USER8> Exactly. These questions are silly even if you substituted a fully sentient human. Should your butler prevent you from making mistakes?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Advice on (Harvard) Grad School? - <AUTHOR> Hi all,
Strange asking this question. I wanted to reach out to ask for advice around going to US Grad School as an international student, particularly with the aim of moving to the Bay Area to contribute to the startup ecosystem - perhaps with my own startup or perhaps to help others!
So at this time, the situation is a very fortunate one. I have a full-ride scholarship to Harvard this fall to continue my Architectural Studies (my gentleman's hobby...) Fortunately, I also get to skip the first year which means the course is 2.5 years with the last 1.5 years of those allowing me to take whatever option courses throughout Harvard and MIT - I'm curious about too much so that possibility is awesome.
On the other hand, I have now developed a lot of doubts about whether the overall situation will be worth it, both short and long term.
- I am British/Irish based in London. Thus have short term immigration problems despite having all visa paperwork.
- First semester+ will be remote (the embassies are closed and they will be bound to have a ton of backlog to work through, providing COVID doesn't again provoke the government to shut down immigration in winter). Working alone without really meeting anyone properly/having the campus experience really drops the value of going back to university.
- Unfortunately for all, it seems quite likely that international working visas will be attacked and reduced (H1-B, OPT etc). Another drop in value.
- My self-propelled study (learning now to pull together software the past year), would be slowed down significantly. At least on my own, I would be able to learn much more outside of a university. Especially a remote university.
- I have some fantastic opportunities in London where I would actually be paid to go to university, with all the uncertainty, this option is getting more attractive.
Thus it's a bit more of a nuanced than that I'm used to! <comment><AUTHOR> \- Extension Comment -

Going back to the idea of the Bay Area (which is somewhere I believe I will end up somehow), will it help me a lot to be in the country? Could anyone manage to get anything done bombing it to the valley on a tourist visa? What would you do if you were in my situation?

Apologies for the long post, it's a situation that I'm really questioning and struggling to answer. The tuned-in wisdom of you guys on HN would help a lot!

<comment><USER2> You seem to be keen on startups, have you explored startup schools/incubators?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have - infact I'm just at the end of going through one now

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I feel like startups value credentials less than experience. I would probably just jump into a startup now so that you can continue to learn while getting real life experience and building that network.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, although I find a big disconnect between what I'm genuinely interested in and the start-up scene here in London/Europe and turned down a few startup offers ultimately for that reason. May be naive but with a visa but there is generally much more exciting opportunity (purely around startups) in US and SV in general - and the visa is what I'm missing and grad school would deliver.

<comment><USER3> Oh, ok. Have you reached out to any US-based startups that you are interested in? Perhaps you can convince them they need a remote European team to help them expand or give them more off-hours support from a different time zone.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an absolutely great idea - I'll get on it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Be prepared for the debt to follow you for a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> What debt?

<comment><USER4> Student loans, unless, of course, you got an entirely free ride to Harvard.</comment></comment></comment>