Given the timelines this is happening along, it would not be surprising if we end up with a middle of the road solution that involves some kind of road marker/beacon standard to provide points of reference for these systems. It only took a decade or so to retrofit LED streetlights.
Out of all the problems with autonomous driving, I'd argue that mapping is one of the easier ones. AFAIK most competitors have generally figured that problem out and as the article points out, that Tesla is bad at it is entirely based on their bad macro decisions. No high-detail maps as a basis paired with mainly relying on vision - what are they thinking?
... a failed analogy to human driving, it seems. If we can drive successfully with just a camera input, then surely the AI ought to be able to accomplish the same, right?!?! It seems this "first principle" point has governed everything that has come afterwards, with (quite literally) deadly consequences.
I think there is a broader food education issue in the US beyond nutrition- folks simply dont know what to buy, cook and eat, over the course of a life time. The quick fix is a fad diet which comes with instructions and recipes, but these ultimately dont build long term habits. So much of how we write about food here is focused on anti- anti junk, anti fat, anti carb. I think this hints towards the root of the problem where most people dont know what a good foundation is. What are the top 5 American dishes that arent a just disaster for your body?
Many US grocery stores sell fully-cooked chickens with minimal spicing for about six dollars. These are loss leaders and are often less than half the price of an uncooked chicken.
Grocery stores also tend to bake their own bread, including basic varieties that don't include sugar, for a few dollars a loaf.
Add a can or frozen bag of vegetables and that's a pretty nutritious day's worth of food for relatively little money.
> Many US grocery stores sell fully-cooked chickens with minimal spicing for about six dollars. These are loss leaders and are often less than half the price of an uncooked chicken
An uncooked chicken is about $10-$15? (£7-£10)?
I don't understand the US combination of terrible animal welfare standards, terrible food hygiene standards, and high cost.
The US actually has fantastic food hygiene standards. I know it's a meme with some UK/EU folks to clutch their pearls over the chlorinated chicken wash but it is in fact based on solid science. It's a different approach but not invalid.
Prices vary by location, but generally you can expect to get uncooked chicken here for under $2/lb. I live in a largish city and typically pay under $1.5/lb.
I agree about the animal welfare standards, but that is most definitely not unique to us. In fact, I'm acquainted with one of the key people in popularizing intensive confinement livestock practices in the midwest US: they're German and brought techniques from there to Kansas. Likewise I've seen first hand what cattle barns are like in Italy, and it is not good.
Assuming you have access to a kitchen, you can feed yourself very well at minimal cost in the US. I loathe our fast food culture, but do not underestimate just how solid the US supermarket system is.
Oh grocery store deli chickens. I've made meals out of those things more times than i can count. Gotta admit, i've always wondered about the odd pricing compared to uncooked chicken. I usually go for sandwhiches or a chicken salad myself though.
How then would you educate people. The problem really seems to stem from the fact that authorities have recommended an extremely unhealthy low-fat diet for so long.
The carbs at the bottom of the food pyramid are killing us.
> The problem really seems to stem from the fact that authorities have recommended an extremely unhealthy low-fat diet for so long.
I imagine that might have some contribution, but my personal experience suggests that the government's bad advice is not to blame for the food choices I make.
Fair, but I as a kid (like 10) had no idea what was and wasn't good. I gobbled pretzels, breads, and the like hoping that eating low fat would make me less fat. I thought I was doing what should be healthy.
That and the fact that the government and other authorities like the American Heart Association claim that whole grains are heart healthy to the point that their labels and or claims of heart healthiness are put on boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios...
The author is trying to get on the outrage train when there is no compelling reason for it. The college kids he cites? A project with 2 likes. Splitting a Papa Johns pizza? Killer use case. OP seems to be grasping at straws to find concrete reasons for the API to exist.
"Drivers, dog walkers, handymen" are mentioned but author doesnt include an actual example - those were all examples supplied by Venmo itself...3 years ago. Who are the developers hes talking about when he says "community that stuck with Venmo"?
And finally, unlike Twitter, which has an plethora number of ways to be consumed, searched and experienced that would be better as different apps - Venmo does not. Its just a P2P payment system.
The way I see it, Venmo has accomplished the following -
1. Deprecated old features (save resources, reduce complexity)
2. Found new way of building profitable and sustainable relationships w other businesses, rather than just a wild west API.
Terrible read, file this under- "How TO Run a Platform"
The biggest API integration I know of is Splitwise. Their Android app has 500K+ installs and it's probably the same ballpark on iOS, which puts them leagues above a college kid with 2 likes.
Splitwise will continue to work and run. The API is not being shut down, they are simply not authorizing new API applications. The article is wrong and massively misleading.
Because they are owned by Braintree (big payments processor) who is owned by PayPal (who used to be owned by eBay before being spun out to be independent)
I agree that the article's examples are great, but you don't need examples to convince me that a zero-warning API shut-off is a bad thing. Regardless of how many people are using the API (if it's non-zero), why not send them emails 3 months in advance? It costs you virtually nothing and almost certainly prevents this article from being written.
I agree that there might not have been concrete reasons for the API to exist (especially considering PayPal has their own API), but shutting down the API with no warning or migration plan was a mean move. Even if the only projects using it are small I still think the developers of them deserve some warning. They still worked hard on those projects and are probably proud of the work they did.
And this is why I never read TechCrunch articles. They are a tabloid, and as far as I can tell have no place on HN. The comments never seize to be amusing though.
Hm - a lot of comments here seem to suggest that your prank ethics are sound- but I think a lot has changed in recent years. With the proliferation of Nathan for You, #goating, College Humor prank wars, youtube shows, etc - when weird things begin to happen, my reflexive response is almost immediately "This must be a prank." and to start accusing possible culprits in a spray and pray attempt to "figure out" the situation. If the pranker fessed up immediately, then there wouldnt be much of a prank.
With prankees increasingly guarded, maybe there should be some leeway in this rule.
Yes. In general I still don't think it's fair play to not admit when confronted, but the fact that the prankee was also a pranker, and ultimately said "well played" and characterized the earlier denial as "OP and gf played it cool" means that OP was just calibrated to the prankee's expectations.
Other than chalking it up to Elon being an absurdly talented superhuman, I'd venture a guess that these industries move at a slower pace. The ground shifts every day on the web, which means day to day leadership is crucial. I'd imagine during the longer development cycles of these companies that he can tune out for extended periods of time without development going astray - especially in areas where his input isn't crucial.
Isn't this more of the very same smarmy navel gazing bullshit OP has taken up arms against? There are plenty of designers doing meaningful work in various fields. The big red flag in this article is the implicit bullshit! Who said design is for social change? Political disruption? What if design is just making these buttons look good so 10 year olds can Snapchat more better? Whos to decide whats a real world problem and whats not?
Jeez, its gotten to the point where I balk when introducing myself as a designer.
Lets not take ourselves so seriously. Lets not let YO be representative of what investors, entrepreneurs, developers and technologists are doing as a whole, despite its outsize media coverage. Lets remember that quirky, weird, seemingly useless things like YO can still put a smile on someones face, even if it didnt solve any of society's problems. What a dry place the world would be if we didnt have things like YO.
Variety is the spice of life. Some will make YO, some will build Tesla, and most of us will fall somewhere in between. Not every startup needs to be a world changer, and thats OK. Thats life.
The author insists that he's not being pretentious, but evaluating what is a good and poor use of someone elses time and smarts seems like just that.
I agree. Though Yo should not have a 1.3 million funding. However, any sane person would quickly recognize that investors put in that 1.3 MM to fund the founders. They don't care about Yo. It may be a situation of "give some smart people who get the internets a bunch of money and hope it sticks". Which is a bit of a bubble IMO.
Fun pattern, but is it more useful? I think its hyperbolic to call losing 160px of reading space on top of a desktop browser a "nightmare". Something a user can see all the time has greater affordances than something that is hidden. Especially if that something is as essential as navigation. Honestly, I think this is more style than usability.
Yes, losing 25% of the already-scarce vertical space is a nightmare, to the extent that UX can be a nightmare. Plus, I've seen sites where the nav bar locks the URL bar in position and keeps me unable to scroll away from it, making it more like 50%. It's like I'm looking at the site through blinds!
And it's all for functionality I'm not even going to use!
To some of the older folks on HN - is this a new problem?
The last few years have brought on a whole different type of newsmedia hybrid (the buzzfeeds, huffpos and gawkers) organization that is driven primarily by clicks and do not hold themselves to the standards of traditional print news. While there were dubious options on paper before (Daily Posts, National Enquirers), the internet is far greater venue for propagating bullshit with clickbait headlines. Some of the newer sites I'm seeing people post on Facebook have skipped the truth part altogether, they go straight to fabricating stories. TV has gone the same direction with news-entertainment.
I'm pretty concerned. When its too hard to find signal in all the noise, I'm afraid folks will give up altogether. With Buzzfeed putting out longform articles and NYT putting up quizzes, its already hard to discern who cares about delivering real news and who will do anything for clicks.
But maybe I'm just young (25), and people have always found echo chambers, and yellow journalism is always something we've had to wade through to find the facts. What do you guys think? Has anything actually changed?
Not really, at least on the issue of pot. What passes for news turns out to be the most lopsided propaganda war since Rome v. Carthage.
Now that pot has regained something of a legal tolerance, medical studies will once again, as if on cue, provide the last line of defense for the puritans and productivity fetishers.
One of the points they touch on is a "world where many things wont work and nobody will know how to fix them". As I understand it, we already live in this world. Some new cars dont come with dipsticks, and I cant look inside my iPhone.
In the case of the car and the phone, they've added complexity (a service layer) and I think its worked out well. The user gets to do what users should do and businesses grow doing what they do best. When it comes to IoT, my first thoughts always drifts towards "will this make things better, or could we muck up what once "just worked"?
We're entering a time where we have the technology, capital and reach to create and distribute new products and services at massive scale. Now that ideas are less constrained by "how", and compete on the "what", do we need to stop and ask ourselves not "Can we do it?", but "Should we do it?"
We can see this in many disrupted industries now, where new ideas, innovation and competition have shook up traditional business models. Whats left in their wake is not always better than what preceded it.
Ill use the social media ad driven business epoch as an example, was that a net positive for us as people? Or did we add a layer of complexity to the web that is now dedicated to delivering Upworthy blog posts, selling our personal information and a constant stream of Coca Cola ads? Is that a good trade off for pictures of Grandma, news from friends and Likes from everyone?
Do we already evaluate technology on these terms, or has our current state driven us to cobble together any business model that works?
In the case of the car and the phone, they've added complexity (a service layer) and I think its worked out well. The user gets to do what users should do and businesses grow doing what they do best.
The idea of removing user serviceable parts is tenable, but basically boils down to saving a sliver of people from shooting themselves in the foot while raising the total cost of ownership for everyone.
The problem with discussing this is that the technical mechanisms for making external service mandatory rather than common is that sometimes the reasoning isn't necessarily to enable a business model leveraging exclusive access. So measures taken to for that reason contort themselves to pretend like they're not that. They sneak it in alongside a chance that does bring me value but pretend like they're intrinsically linked, even when they're not.
A dipstick replaced by a computerized sensor to the in-dash readout, or iphones in a world where everyone who wants to fiddle around gets an android device are relatively benign examples.
I can do some car maintenance, but if I needed a new clutch I'd take it in to get serviced. The fact that my brother can and would replace his own clutch keeps costs down at the shop for me. The fact I can go to a mechanic not licensed by Ford keeps costs down. The fact I can buy off-brand parts for many simple service jobs keeps costs down.
My co-worker bought a replacement battery for his car but couldn't install it himself, it cost him 2 hours of service available only from the dealership to get the car's DRM switched to the new battery. I don't consider this state of affairs and trajectory we're on at large "working out well."
On my car some times when I push the volume button it freezes the radio and I have to turn it off and on again to fix it... this is just a car radio here.. Itll be a long time until iot. But I agree it will be awesome when that happens 50 years from now. Until then im sticking to a coffee maker that wont lock up due to a software error when im dying for some coffee.
