skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many of the comments in this thread follow a similar pattern. They are all essentially derivatives of Goodhart's law. [0]

>> Once a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

It's quite useful to have a name - a label - for this sort of behaviour. In this case, the means by which VW optimised for this metric was crafty computer software! A metric is only as good as the cost of the unintended consequences that come with imposing it on people, in particular large corporations.

I am not surprised that this is done by many corporations as mentioned elsewhere in the comments (ATI/Nvidia etc). This is because regulations and benchmarks that can be gamed, such as engine efficiency, will be gamed because the incentives of corporations work out that way:

(I hope this isn't perceived as an anti-corporate rant because it's not. Just a way of framing facts).

For regulations imposed on large corporations in general (think EPA admissions standards):

1) Regulations are mandated by a government to effect some purpose (stop destroying Earth)

2) Executives - the people running the corporations - are bound by legal responsibility - their fiduciary duty [1] - to create value for their shareholders (selling lots of cars, and profitably).

3) Regulations can obstruct the activities of a corporation by making them do things they don't want to (making efficient cars is hard and costly and affects the bottom line - its cheaper to manufacture a car with less platinum [2] in it)

4) Companies are incentivized to minimize the time and money spent on adhering to regulations

5) Once a regulation is standardised and codified, it becomes possible to follow the letter of it, while ignoring the spirit of it. All a corporation has to do is meet the metrics in the specification to abide by the regulation - in other words - game the system.

Given these incentives, we have seen that corporations prefer to abide by regulations in the maximally efficient way: gaming them. Thus reducing a well-meaning government initiative to gamesmanship.

Kudos to the EPA for calling VW out on this. This kind of incident reinforces (in me at least) the idea that environmental legislation is an extraordinarily difficult thing to get right.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fiduciary_duty

[2] Catalytic convertors
got it re the legal framework.

it would interesting to see something like this tested in court.

Do you know what qualifies as a legal framework when entering a weekend hackathon? Is there a different bar for something like this vs a standard employment situation?
Well there's a simplistic view of the world if I ever saw one. It is not, for many people, the advertisers that are the problem, but the ad networks.

It's the ad networks that cookie and track.
It's the ad networks that load the website with horribly slow loading external JS.
It's the ad networks that want to track, profile and retarget us to death.
It's the ad networks that use any means possible to get that view. From animations and modals to popunders, sound and other trickery.
It's the bottom feeding ad networks that accidentally end up pushing malware out. Repeatedly.

Most web sites are loading so many external scripts, ads and trackers that the experience is simply broken. Without ad, social and script blocking the web has become unusably slow.

Meanwhile, I and many others would be glad to see ads from the little guy - without all the cruft and pollution, if I could do so safe from all the above.

That little guy just wants an advert to get her new business going. The ad network sold them all the other crap.
Such a great post, thx for writing it, you inspired me to write about how to stop the startup Bullshit... Startup Weekend has always been neutral and we should remind our community why / what it really mean.

@peignoir
It looks like the startup is up and running (presumably, with the unlicensed code): http://www.staffedup.com/

At this point, Bobby & co. should just sit back and let Billy try to make it into a success. Then sue him for using their code.
What is Slack’s secret to growth?
Don't confuse "death" with "irrelevance".

There are companies out there still shambling along that used to be dominant but are now ghostly memories of their former selves.
I'm signed up for Contributor. I blacklist ads on every site where I see them, which is most of them; as far as I can tell, this also stops Contributor from working on those sites.

Seriously. Take my money. But you don't get to show me ads. And I'm not going to bow out of visiting those sites; that would almost cut me off from the internet entirely.
GitHub implements Subresource Integrity
This looks like a fantastic technology to protect against maliciously injected javascript. Great to see GitHub leading the charge here and taking their security seriously.
Holy crap, I didn't even know about the Skype event! Thanks for the link. Probably the best and funniest endorsement grsecurity ever had haha. However, I've enjoyed for years calling them on running Hotmail on FreeBSD and what it took them to replace the reliable AS/400 running their business with Windows servers. Funny shit.

Kin situation is another I didn't know about. Just wow. Most companies would have to work to screw up that bad. Microsoft is clearly a natural. Can't wait to see how much mockery (or praise) I have to offer at end of Nadella's reign. Honestly, though, I hope he transforms it operationally like Lipner's SDL did for security. Microsoft Research, in particular, has tons of potential that could inspire new stuff just to compete with whatever they offer. And then we buy the competing, hopefully-OSS stuff. ;)
Broken, Abandoned, and Forgotten Code, Part 12 – Malloc/Free Spelunking
Are there benchmarks that show for simple "glue code" that commonly used interpreted languages are 20x slower.
XcodeGhost, an Xcode trojan, was published just 1 week after Schneier's post
I've never been to one and was unaware of this rule. If this is true it should have been the focus of the article and made very clear. It wasn't. It also isn't clear to me that Billy gets free code. If the other guys refuse to sign up why does Billy end up with free code? it isn't stated in the article and doesn't strike me as obvious
Yup. Very well put.
"Whales" are critical to the revenue of many industries. gambling, alcohol, gaming, fashion, etc. all make a large chunk of their revenue from a small(ish) number of whales. Obviously the percentages vary by industry, but there's a reason when you go to Vegas and drop 10k at the craps table that you can get a "free" luxury suite from the hotel.
I've been doing a lot of work on a new optimal eviction policy. It out performs or matches the current gold standard, without requiring the cache holds evicted keys as those policies do (doubles or triples the physical size). Instead it uses a 4-bit CountMinSketch to record the historic frequency and two LRU queues to balance temporal workloads (high/low frequency + high time locality). This approach is simpler, fast, and much more memory efficient.

By moving to a policy that knows which entries are hot, a fast path read could be added to skip policy maintenance for the hottest entries. This could improve performance by 2-3x on a Zipf workload (typical) and has minimal impact on the hit rate.

We're hoping to publish a paper on this new policy. I'm currently integrating it into the cache (but already implemented in the simulator).
This comment breaks the HN guidelines, as have some of your other comments. Please (re-)read the rules and follow them when posting here. That means commenting civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
Rothenberg Ventures Invests $700,000 Across 7 New VR Startups in ‘River’ Program
A Fort Myers company is putting its environmentally-friendly fuel on the market for Floridians. Algenol Biofuels is first to patent ethanol made from algae. It’s been developing this product for nine years.

Algenol’s fuel leaves 69 percent less of a carbon footprint than regular gasoline. It’s also cheaper-- at $1.30 per gallon. The company heats up carbon dioxide-filled algae, using sunlight. And through photosynthesis, it converts that carbon into the four most important fuels: ethanol, gasoline, jet fuel and diesel. The only bi-product of this is freshwater.

“We have a really advanced technology that could make a very, very big difference in climate change and carbon emissions," said Paul Woods, founder of Algenol Biofuels.

He’s recently partnered with Protec Fuel, another Florida-based company, to commercially distribute his products around the state. Woods said Algenol will open its first commercial facility in Central Florida between the end of next year and early 2017. He also plans to announce international partnerships in China, India and the Middle-east.
How to enforce a ban on vegetarianism
Summary: "A study published on Thursday in the journal Science reported that the ancestors of the Inuit evolved unique genetic adaptations for metabolizing omega-3s and other fatty acids. Those gene variants had drastic effects on Inuit’s bodies, reducing their heights and weights.

... the discovery raised questions about whether omega-3 fats really were protective for everyone, despite decades of health advice. “The same diet may have different effects on different people,” he said."
Very cool project. I would be good to have an AI similar to this and if it could read and comprehend lots of research articles. I dream of a AI capable of reading all research articles on the latest battery tech and then be able to understand and make recomendations from that. The question I would like us to ask the AI how would you create the worlds most efficient battery?
Top Funniest Old Commercials. (Don’t Judge Too Quickly)
I have no doubt the author is a good developer. He does seem to undervalue all the hustling Billy is doing. Sounds like he has customers lined up. I would kill for a startup founding partner like that
BE RWD – Verify if your website is fully optimized for mobile devices
An ad blocker on iOS 9 is basically just an app wrapper around a JSON file. I'm not surprised a decent iOS developer would figure they could whip one out in a day or two of coding just as a proof of concept, and then release it to see if they make a few bucks. Not a lot of deep introspection involved.

If you suddenly sell 20k copies at $3 each, and make enough in a day to buy a BMW, then maybe you think a bit more.
It's not a rule now. This move was legal at the time.

You can reasonably object that you shouldn't be expected to know that history, but that makes it quite different from "rook can spontaneously transform into a queen" and similar.
>He's a guy who has enough money, wants to do what he loves, and doesn't enjoy controversy.

Doesn't he? He always seemed like a guy wanting to go into controversy to me.

Not of John McAffee levels of course, but still far more vocal and controversial than most tech bloggers, especially when they're not professional bloggers in the first place (this site is just his outlet, not his core business like for Gruber or others).
You should have said that this is a book in the title.
Who needs 1200 vertical pixels? 1080 should be enough for everyone!
"C++ instead of bare bones unsafe C" is C++ really much safer than C?

"an OOP ABI (COM)" you really think this sort of thing is super great and there's nothing like it on "UNIX clones"?

I have heard interesting things about windows async i/o syscalls, but as you'll see in another sub-thread, IIS still has a major component in the kernel, because the overall syscall overhead of windows is apparently somewhat high.

This wouldn't be the first time I've heard of super-fancy windows subsystem designs which in practice were sabotaged by just generally over-complicated implementations. I recall a blog post by Mark Russinovich around the time Vista came out about the new, quite advanced file copying algorithms: http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/0... - but that file copying performance was often significantly reduced when playing an mp3 file due to the "multimedia class scheduler" - http://superuser.com/questions/18600/107mb-s-network-file-co... - either because i/o and execution priorities didn't actually work, or the engineer assigned to do this didn't know what he was doing and neither did anyone he worked with. Who knows?

This sort of thing is all over microsoft's stuff. Theoretically super advanced, in practice just over-complicated. It's closed source and hugely complicated, so we'll never really know why it doesn't work as well as it should.
Unless a "bioethicist" can make testable predictions, there is no reason you should listen to them when formulating policy. They are secular priests, nothing more.
This is great, but only if your CDN is not also serving your HTML files! (static sites)
I'm not going to bow out of visiting those sites; that would almost cut me off from the internet entirely.

This is exactly the entitled attitude I was referring to.
> I mentioned I was speculating

That doesn't matter. Insinuations without evidence of astroturfing, shillage, corruption, etc., have no place on HN. Please don't do that again.
> The NYT is being disingenuous in presenting this as VW detecting the EPA test cycle and doing something to cheat. I think they've confused open loop and closed loop engine operation.

The NYT is not at all confused. The cars in question have software in the ECM specifically meant to detect testing. The software looks at various inputs, including steering wheel position, speed, duration of operation, and barometric pressure. The values it looks for precisely track the parameters of the federal test procedure use for EPA certification.

When the software detected this, it switched to a mode that VW actually called "dyno calibration". At all other times, it used a mode VW called "road calibration".

Source: http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/cert/documents/vw-nov-caa-09-18-15....
Honestly, it's far simpler than that. Most casinos these days have player cards that every machine accepts that from the players perspective can store money on, but is really just giving them the ability to keep perfect tabs on player habits. Combined with fully networked machines, it's seems futile to move between machines just to try and throw the odds around, as they're most likely tracked and adjusted in real time.
Couldn't agree more. It could even add ascii images for a touch of 1337.

looks forward to seeing a shell version
Well, this is where the analogy breaks down right? You can easily avoid going to a diner with an infamous reputation, but you can't go to websites the same way.

You figuratively have no way of knowing what ad networks they're integrated with until said ad networks are loaded and serving ads. Or worse, you have no idea what you're in for until the latest Flash 0-day has pwned your machine. Hell, it's impossible to even know if a website is integrated with any ad networks at all until you load them.

This makes the ethics of blocking ads markedly different from say, dining and dashing. Hell, it makes it a closer neighbor to "if you're reading this you've already agreed to our TOS" than anything else.

I think the biggest issue I have here is that internet journos are taking this out against users rather than ad networks. Effectively the entire defense so far has been:

"yeah our ad networks are shitty, they are full of malware, they are full of user-hostile abusive shit, they exploit your browser, and they are horribly engineered and slow. We sympathize, but despite the fact that we they are still our preferred vendor should in no way reflect on us and you should continue allowing the abuse, and if you have any problems take it up with our ad vendors. In no way should we be held in any way responsible for the current sorry state of affairs"

Which is a completely, absolutely, insanely bullshit stance. Publishers are the customers of ad networks, not us, and until they start pushing for better standards (like, say, The Deck) users will keep blocking them, ethically or otherwise.
It's the community, and the moderation that keeps the community from getting worse.
What we break when we fix ad blocking
Someone just want to make a reddit fuse fs and get it over with? /s

Cool stuff.
>> "Its an experimental study, the number of subjects isn't really that important."

I'd be interested to understand why this is?

I replied to cossatot below in more detail. The short version: In studies like this one, N isn't 5, but humans(e.g. the original N) x treatment repetitions x measurement points.

You are right that it would be dangerous to ignore it, that wasn't what I implied.
Just to add to this- He recently said on Twitter he is handing the app over to ghostery, so its not like the app is gone. Its going to be back.
You'd start with detailed information about the camera itself, to factor out aberrations related to the lens and the sensor. After that I'd imagine the most efficient approach would be differential feature mapping from multiple photos taking into account the known facts about trajectory, speed etc.

Conceptually it's simple, just very very intensive in terms of the amount of computation required...but well within the capabilities of NASA or even dedicated amateur researchers. As I understand it we are still slowly downloading pictures from the flyby and there is more to come (although it will be of lower resolution from here on out if NASA is releasing them in order of acquisition). Once the complete set has been compiled I imagine that creating a 3d model would be a high priority.

You could look into how Google did their Moon and Mars virtual environments, though I understand they also had the benefit of radar/lidar mapping data as well as optical.
If the rule was simply, "A promoted pawn may be exchanged for any piece," then that would fit within a permissive system, and still qualify as "nothing says you have to promote to the same color."
I'm 24 and I've already run out of things to want =/
Thanks for sharing your work. As a hobby, I have spent years working on extracting semantic ontologies from natural language, so it was fun to see someone else's take on the problem.

As other have mentioned, you will make progress more efficiently if you survey the linguistics literature, where a tremendous number of very smart people have spent decades grappling with the same essential problems.

Heterodox linguistics is a veritable goldmine of ideas that can be implemented in AI. My favorite approach is Richard Hudson's "word grammar," which you can read about here: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/wg.htm

Word grammar is particularly well suited for coding, because it strips away lots of arbitrary linguistic formalisms in favor of a flexible, network-centric framework. Some of the core principles, like default inheritance, were actually taken directly from computer science.
Expensive and underperforming products are sold for millions every day in the enterprise software industry. That's not due to their engineering or UX, and certainly not to their customer support, it's mostly professional sales in action...
Perhaps it's where they are built. I assume most US-bound VWs are from Mexico or US proper due to NAFTA and auto-import regulations.
FetLife, the kinky social network, is entirely remote.
Who Owned Which Patents When
Plus, programmers started imagining they
could innovate as designers and we have
Gnome 3, Unity, etc.

I always thought those happened because someone allowed designers to make decisions on the projects? "Usability" I think has been the main driver behind a lot of the problems I have experienced over the last few years.
"Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread."

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
Sorry, I'm not a native speaker. I thought the word "petrol" includes diesel, too!
Paywalls are inconvenient, and in some cases arguably inappropriate. It's annoying to follow a link to a paywall. Complaining about that != "reviled."

But none of that is as intrusive as modern ad tech. Ads dug their own grave, slowly, gradually, and are now shocked to find people are shoveling dirt in on top of them.

Moreover, ad blockers are a proportionate response to Web bugs, trackers, and ad tech in general. E-mail marketing figured out how to be tolerable. Ads have not. They keep pushing the boundaries. I've seen some startup ideas around "good" ads, but eventually the people behind these ideas just can't resist the Dark Side.
Kurmanjan Datka
Just because they used various tools to attempt to meet EPA standards doesn't mean any or all of those tools are illegal. What you're describing sounds like either a smog pump and/or a charcoal canister. Both are legal and widely used means of controlling emissions.

The emissions guidelines, in your case, likely weren't being "gamed" so much as the manufacturers were just coming up with innovative and cheap ways of reducing emissions. Start/stop features on some newer cars are a way of doing this but this doesn't sound like someone "gaming" the system. If you're not very automotive savvy then you may have misunderstood what the technician was explaining or the logic/purpose behind the system.

What VW did though is completely different with regards to the software although not necessarily illegal until we have all the facts. Based on what the article says, it sounds like they developed a special "emissions mode" which went outside the normal operating parameters with the ultimate goal of reducing the emissions. That in and of itself is not illegal since it passed emissions that way. The illegal part probably comes from when it switch back into normal mode where it never would have passed emissions that way.

We can assume for one reason or another that the "emissions mode" is unsustainable for regular driving (for one reason or another) which is why it was only used when absolutely necessary to pass emissions.
To add context:

<Novel Malware XcodeGhost Modifies Xcode, Infects Apple iOS Apps and Hits App Store>
http://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/2015/09/novel-mal...

<Hack Brief: Malware Sneaks Into the Chinese iOS App Store>
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/hack-brief-malware-sneaks-chine...

<How the CIA Might Target Apple's XCode>
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/03/how_the_cia_m...

Affected apps include:

- WeChat, messaging app, around 500-600 mil users.

- Railway 12306, the only official app for ordering Sinorail train tickets in China.

- Didi Taxi, Uber's main rival in China.

- AutoNavi, the largest map provider in China, serving Google/Bing/Apple maps.

- China Unicom customer service, 1 of the 2 major ISP in China.

And many others.
Yup. I also find that the Rails documentation is good enough that I can usually find what I need in the Rails guides and API docs- or failing that, the source code.
Bioethics in its present incarnation is a fine example of perverse incentives at work. The people involved are rewarded when they invent problems, slow down progress, and add expense to development; their very jobs depend on providing a supply of spanners in the works. The whole field should be thrown out of polite society and all of the funding they siphon away from actually making progress in medicine redirected to productive use.
Should be "sha256-..." (without dash between sha and 256)
If you're in Europe, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System (which goes all the way to the termination shock, apparently.)