While it's true that increased competition among market makers have driven spreads down, decimalization was also a factor. For example:
http://www.sec.gov/news/testimony/052401tslu.htm
"For example, OEA estimates that, from December 2000 to March 2001, quotation spreads in securities listed on the New York Stock Exchange ("NYSE") narrowed an average of 37%, and effective spreads narrowed 15%. An even more dramatic reduction in quotation spreads was observed in Nasdaq securities, with spreads narrowing an average of 50% following decimalization, and effective spreads narrowing almost as much."
Technically, that's an example of a rule that was passed to eliminate the middlemen's profits.
Please. Like this project was just sitting there, waiting for a media shitstorm to pop up. The knee-jerk cynicism on these threads is truly getting stupid.
The timing is almost certainly because the project's secrecy had been recently compromised by the FDA revealing a meeting with the engineering team on its public calendar.
"... Mercedes-Benz announced Monday that it had successfully driven an autonomous S-Class sedan 62 miles on German city streets."
Well, shit, that quote right there plus your hostile attitude sure have me impressed. 62 whole miles! They're clearly on the doorstep of releasing a production autonomous car, as you were trying to imply over at <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6408590>.
Meanwhile, that other company's car has made the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles (at least 380 miles, in case you didn't know):
Well, shit, that quote right there plus your hostile attitude sure have me impressed. 62 whole miles! They're clearly on the doorstep of releasing a production autonomous car
I'm here to impress you sir, that's my mission in life.
Now who said that they drove a total of 62 miles vs a 62 mile trip? Did the car crash at mile 62 or they reached the destination? All these are little details that need to be taken in consideration before an idiot exclaims "Google is #1 in autonomous cars..."
Well, sorry to say that you're failing pretty hard at your mission then. But do keep ramping up the snarky rhetoric. It looks like I hit a nerve.
I didn't say anything about total miles; I was comparing Mercedes' single 62 mile trip against the other car's single 380+ mile trip. But if you want to bring up total miles logged, That Company In Mountain View hit 300k miles last year [1] and there are absolutely no public numbers from Mercedes. If the figure were impressive, they'd probably have released it.
But now you want to make a fuss over the LIDAR on top of That Company's car while the S Class gets by on just radar. Your earlier post quoted a Mercedes engineer saying "we have had test cars doing that, but what happens if a child steps out into the street and the radar misses it?" -- well, gosh, maybe that funny spinning thing is doing something useful. Wouldn't you want an autonomous car to use any and every available method to detect obstacles? Details indeed.
Okay, I'd say you're both off here. I think you're right that Bsullivan should take Google more seriously - I think he's going to have to eat his hat with the way Google is heading. But you shouldn't dismiss Mercedes - the German car companies are very smart, and have the potential to be top players over the coming decades.
You're so absolutely and completely wrong that you're probably trolling, but:
Google implemented vector maps on Android long before Apple introduced their own maps (i.e. ~years). Likewise, 3D buildings have been available through Earth for years, and rendering them in Maps was an obvious next step. Ultimately, both Apple and Google launched 3D at right around the same time.
Last, as a sibling poster pointed out, if you think all of this was started in reaction to MapBox's work (earliest public mention I found was April 1st) and completed less than 3 months later, then that's just fucking admirable execution right there. But alas, that probably wasn't copied either.
Now that you say it, you're totally right about the vector maps thing.
I don't think it's impossible cloudless aerials were inspired by MapBox though... I think you and your sibling overestimate how hard it is to chop up and process imagery with a cluster of computers.
The new base map imagery was preceded by the Timelapse release last month, which used basically the same techniques on historical data. See: <http://world.time.com/timelapse/> and <http://earthengine.google.org/>. It ought to be pretty clear that both of these have been in the works for a long time.
If you seriously believe that _any_ mapping provider (including Microsoft, Nokia, or Google) hasn't been actively removing clouds from their imagery for a very, very long time, then you haven't been paying attention. No one needed MapBox to give them the idea of removing the giant patches of white obscuring everything in view.
In any case, your willingness to comment on a subject that you obviously know little about -- and then extrapolate your wrongness into a statement about the industry -- is impressive. Every sentence of your original post is wrong.
Well, I can definitely understand why you would make your remarks anonymously. I still don't think I'm uninformed to suggest this is not a coincidence, despite you berating me.
I was chatting with my colleague at work today, who actually stood up our landsat servers and does all of our tiling work, and he thinks that the pixel-averaging technique to de-cloud the images was an innovation that was pretty unique to MapBox. According to this article, they noticed a guy doing it in February 2013, and hired him right away to do it for them: http://www.wired.com/design/2013/05/a-cloudless-atlas/.
MapBox got to market with it in just a few months, and it's a particularly absurd argument to say this was too hard for Google's hundreds of maps engineers to implement. I heard at the State of the Map conference that it was just a few guys working on it at MapBox. Given Google already has the imagery, and the processing pipeline, I think adopting this declouding technique was actually a piece of cake.
Also, while Google has been removing clouds from their images for a long time, I think their technique has been to pick the best of many images. Their imagery used to have many more clouds in it, until all of a sudden.
Excuse me, but given your history of writing overly verbose, self-important Grand Proclamations: I imagine the only reason someone would have to hire you is if they wanted tomes written about how they could Do Things Right while probably not getting much actual work product done in return.
When someone spouts big talk like "start doing things right. Since you don't know how, you have to hire someone like me and give that person lots of autonomy, but it can be done" and all they're known for (please correct me if I'm wrong here) is writing a lot of text on HN, I don't think a little snark is out of line.
I get that railing against unsympathetic targets like big corporations makes for entertaining reading, but I don't think that actually qualifies anyone for the job he was describing.
while probably not getting much actual work product done in return.
That was fucking low, man.
I'm actually extremely productive when things work right, but when people persist in fuck-uppery it's like a low-grade chronic earthquake-- not exactly dangerous, but jarring and impossible to ignore and eventually exhausting.
By the way, the danger of startups isn't failure. It's that you end up like me: someone who can't tolerate the mediocrity, idiocy, and resistance to creativity that most people bring to their working lives. In most corporate environments, those are affordable background noise. In startups, they're existential risks. Unfortunately, it's hard to unlearn an allergy to fuck-uppery.
I am humble in the sense that I have a keen awareness of my limitations. I don't know what happens after death. I don't know if there is a God. I don't know more than 1.5 natural languages. I'm a mediocre athlete. On most topics, I'm less smart than a person with a passing knowledge of the field, and my opinion is consequently less useful.
I'm arrogant insofar as I've seen through the corporate nonsense and, after having watched people way inferior to me making huge decisions that affect peoples' lives, I feel an urge to step up. I know for a fact that these intellectual children are not the best people to be making such calls, because I am better.
Now, that said, I'm far from the smartest person out there and if someone smarter than me steps up so I don't have to, then that's great! I don't care about being the leader and I'd rather not. I want a competent leader. If that person is someone other than me, then great! But usually the people who are smarter than me shy away from power; they're smart enough to realize that that competition is utterly soul-raping.
The world needs people like me with actual competence and the courage to, at least, try to turn it into something.
Notice I am not objecting to you making the statements you have made; I'm just saying that with such statements, will come attacks. Justified or not, expect them.
I like animated disagreement. My wife and I argue constantly. It's great, because although I have a lot of good ideas, I have plenty of bad ones. Ideas are best tempered with fire. Let's beat the damn thing until we have something good. It's a difficult, chaotic process and it takes a lot of passionate minds. Corporate processes tend toward creative mediocrity by default because no one cares. Well, if no one cares, then why are we having this fucking meeting? Just go off and do it, then.
Ad hominem attacks piss me off because they're just so fucking useless. They add nothing, but they change the discussion to a toxic one quickly.
Maybe he wasn't making an ad hominem attack. Maybe I'm just insecure because so much of my career has been wasted on manager-blessed bullshit and I'm finally waking up. I lost someone last winter, so the value of time has really been impressed on me of late.
First, you imply that underlying intention behind the Fiber deployment in Provo is to make surveillance a piece of cake by practically serving up data on a platter. You admit no other possibility, since this "only helps support" your thesis.
Then someone calls you on it, and you back off and say you weren't implying anything, just that [the NSA] has an interest in building up infrastructure there.
Did you even consider the possibility that both parties might be coincidentally interested in Provo for entirely different reasons?
What kind of implications could this tool possibly have for witness protection? It returns data that was explicitly entered in connection with a specific disaster, and you can only search by name. Someone who's in hiding isn't going to give out their original identity, so how exactly do you propose to use this to track them?
Did you even click through to see what this thing really does, or did you actually just assume that "Person Finder" must be some kind of magical privacy-violating anal probe and rush to type out the first paranoid, nonsensical and idiotic thing to run through your head and click post as a knee-jerk reaction?
Wooow. I was just curious. I wasn't intending to throw FUD around or anything of the sort. I didn't think it was privacy violating. I think it's great, in fact. Calm down :)
Technically, that's an example of a rule that was passed to eliminate the middlemen's profits.