skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My initial comment was incorrect and has been updated. However, have you actually tried the scenario you describe? In the past, when I have changed my Google account password and logged into a new computer, I have had to enter my previous account password on the new computer to decrypt the data before Sync would work. Indeed, if you look in Chrome Sync's settings, you will see text that looks like this: "All data was encrypted with your Google password as of Jan 17, 2015", letting you know which version of your password to use.
In general I agree that yes, the answer is "more science", although my intuition tells me that some domains are too complex to ever be modeled accurately by humans...meaning writing and managing the codebase to accurately model some domains, even with infinite computing power, would be impossible due to humans limited mental capacities. What those domains are, however, I don't know and don't want to guess. I just suspect they exist.

In regards to your point about policy, if it is implicit (as in findings reported by the media), that's fine. However, as soon as policy is made explicit, either through law, or through national policies such as the food nutrition pyramid, interest groups immediately begin forming to protect said explicit policy. The rules our policymakers have to follow were explicitly designed in a way that makes changing policy a slow, arduous process to protect swift changes that could have dangerous, unknown side effects that every citizen would have to deal with. When we prematurely start explicitly making policies based on empirical results in domains of chaotic systems (i.e., those domains where unknown, new variables appear often and change the course of things), those policies have a higher chance of being wrong, and it becomes (by design) very hard to change those policies later on. This is where my concern is rooted.
Sounds like a situation that could be polluted with something like what Moxie Marlinspike did with googlesharing, in an effort to bury the signal in the noise.
So, any guesses as to who 'Joseph Farrell' is?
This is an absurdly irresponsible thing to claim.
Well, that sounds annoying - what's the point of autopilot if you still have to keep your hands on the steering wheel and pay attention to the traffic...

It's like having to hold a button your hands free headset in order to be able to talk :-)
Yes, I'm sure people blame the media because they perceive it as popular and not because killers leave manifestos saying they do it because of the attention it will bring them.

>‘I have noticed,’ it says, ‘that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.’

-TFA
That sounds like a UI issue. Like, it shouldn't be too hard to put a blinkenlight on the control that indicates it's under autopilot control (or the absence indicates it isn't).
Sales of fake hands might go up a bit in the near future: http://www.caufields.com/productimages/halloween/weapons/ima... :-)
Link to referenced paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03622v1.pdf
Can also mention the eyesores and ecological ruin created by coal mining and oil sands extraction.
For a much lighter read, the SEP article is only around 30 pages long: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computer-science/
I found this a little problematic:

FAROO indexes only pages which are located in the Internet, but no Intranet pages or HTTPS protected pages

If it simply can't see HTTPS pages, it'll leave a large chunk of the internet invisible to the search engine. I understand the reason for this, but it's a technical limitation they'll have to find a way past to make it useful as more and more sites encrypt by default.
When medical staff see someone resolutely starving themselves in a state psychiatric institution, drinking liters of water before their daily weigh-ins to nudge the number up, and hiding their full Ensure cans from nurses to avoid the calories, it is hard to chalk it all up to any normal and relatable definitions of the words habit or willpower, especially given that the behavior overcomes the drive for energy consumption, one of the strongest and most primitive drives in all organisms, and one which seems abolished in a deranged fashion. Even if habituation plays a major role in the development of the disease, it is hard to seriously consider the proposed solutions like "switch to eating with the left hand, as a reminder to think about eating different foods" as promising therapies in cases of recalcitrant anorexia. Which is not to say it won't be tried; I imagine side effects are minimal...
Default Alive or Default Dead?
Direct control vs abstract control vs intelligence interaction has been a long running topic in HCI. For the most part it has been evolving in funny ways (i.e. skumorphism used metaphors from direct control to execute abstract control).

I think the design language will evolve slowly with the users at a speed roughly related to the adoption curve.

It may tell users everything that the car is deciding to do now, and as confidence in the system increases with adoption, it will do less and less.

That is why more advance self-driving car researchers are working on the harder problems of getting abstract and intelligent interaction with a car working. The real market problem is just telling you car "take me to the store" rather than just getting it to drive down a straight lane.
Her Code Got Humans on the Moon–And Invented Software Itself
Thanks for this. I had no idea a different mechanism existed.
Thanks for the link! I answered some questions about our technique earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9157777 ), which may help elucidate context.
I don't think it's the traffic law that is complex, but the liability involved. If my car picks its own speed and gets the speed limit wrong, who is responsible?

You could say that the ultimate responsiblity lies with the driver, but taking this position effectively means that all self-driving features are pointless (since this implies that the driver should be concentrating on the driving at all times).

If the responsibility lies (partially, at least) with the car manufacturer, they are going to get a lot of lawsuits thrown at them when it gets the speed limit wrong. Every speeding ticket, every accident where the car was going too fast, etc.
It's not universal that cars ignore the pedals. On my car (14 years old...) cruise control is deactivated when you press the clutch or brake, and the car responds to the accelerator as normal, slowing down once you stop accelerating.
Relevant news report from when the FDA took regulatory action.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fda-warns-23andme-tells-genetic-...
The answer lies in your question. State =\= Congress.
In New York, there's case law that ULC ministers don't meet the statutory qualifications for a marriage officiant, and therefore marriages in New York before ULC ministers are invalid.

But the case in point involved a marriage outside the state, invalid under local law. The city clerk of NYC still registers ULC ministers as officiants and still accepts marriage licenses from them, so the case law is meaningless unless someone raises it in the divorce case.
Some drivers near me will mark the trip 'complete' before dropping off their current passenger. This way they're already in the queue for the next passenger. Then it may take them 5-15min to finish dropping someone off then getting over to you.
But does the camera obey the underlying "Speed safe for conditions" rule in effect in most jurisdictions. (They use this to avoid the possibility of there being no limit should a problem crop up with the signs).

It is very possible to get a speeding ticket well below the legal limit. It isn't common, but where fog/snow/ice/rain are a factor I have seen cops hand them out to idiots. And 'conditions' can include the condition of your vehicle. Driving with bald/track tires in the rain can result in an 'unsafe speed' ticket should a cop see you slide.
EFF has been having a marked increase in its success rate lately. Good to see.
Sounds like this was just passed down without via religious institutions, then stripped of authority to make it sane for government. Probably no one bothering to remove the officiant as it doesn't really impact anyone? What happens if you don't even involve an officiant and just send them a copy of the form?
Remember Amazon went public in '97 and took another 4-5 years to turn a small profit. To answer your question, smart investors are more concerned with the long term strategy than whether the company is turning a profit in the present moment. It is far from uncommon to raise a bunch of capital from the public market to invest in growth.

This is not a comment on Square's prospects, but their business model is clearly one that is betting on getting to very big scale before turning a profit.
I am currently learning about stochastic optimal control, and am finding the lecture notes [1] for this course [2] to be extremely helpful. The notes are by a probabilist Ramon Van Handel at Princeton. I hope you find them useful!

[1] https://www.princeton.edu/~rvan/acm217/ACM217.pdf
[2] https://www.princeton.edu/~rvan/acm217/acm217.html
I find it ridiculous that a 5 star rating is expected for an OK (average) ride. 5-stars should be reserved for exceptional rides.
Rapaport is also the man behind the rather exhaustive Buffalo Restuarant guide:

http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/restaurant.guide/

And he was a central figure in the construction of the Buffalo sentence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
>>Fermi Paradox calls bullshit.

Fermi Paradox assumes ET would like to communicate, or be allowed to be detected in some way.

That's a very big assumption, given how many unknown unknowns exist out there.
Sure. For example, what it means for a program to be correct. "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" is a joke, but also a playful illustration of a complicated topic. It's worth thinking critically and clearly about these things, and will only become more relevant as formal verification & specification enters our field. It's especially useful when defining undefined behavior, or just implementing an imprecise spec. Analytic philosophy in general is summed up thus:

"When we have realized the obstacles in the way of a straightforward and confident answer, we shall be well launched on the study of philosophy—for philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions, not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically, after exploring all that makes such questions puzzling, and after realizing all the vagueness and confusion that underlie our ordinary ideas." - Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm)
If it should be priced at $0/share, then I'd like to have 100% of it, please :-) Oh, but wait.... the founders want to get mega-rich if it succeeds!

There is no inherent conflict between working on what you like with good people/culture, and also sharing fairly in the mega-riches in the remote possibility the thing is successful. But for some reason, employees routinely accept terms where they'll still be just making ends meet (at least in silicon valley, a million is barely a house) even if the company is so successful that the founders get to university buildings named after them.
Hadn't thought about 40G/100G ethernet. It'd definitely be in that same area for doing that. I'd definitely agree that the obstacles at this point are either minor or a "why bother" kind of thing. With speeds continuing to go up, I'd expect it in a generator or two simply because the "why bother" will shift the other way, why bother to make a new standard when this one does it too and is nearly ubiquitous. My guess at least for peripherials is going to be in the optical thunderbolt area, more because of the way the device network matches what people are designing for anyway. I'd guess once there's two standards, a local (optical pcie) and remote (optical ethernet), things might begin converging more and more until it's less distinct between the two.

I'd expect optical more because it's easier to get high bandwidth and low latency on interconnects than copper because of the lower crosstalk and everything. It's just a question of market forces pushing things to converge.
Private car ownership is already superfluous in NYC thanks to the MTA. I'd expect a bigger difference in cities with inadequate public transit infrastructure.
Many apps do have pinch to zoom on viewports. Just about any app that displays pictures, for example, or any app that displays large amounts of text.
They recently had a model update that shipped with a fairly extensive set of sensors (I have a family friend who recently updated his Model S for these features). The initial model didn't have these.
Kill time? Regardless of who is driving, time spend sitting the car is time spend away from family/pets/work/food/bathrooms and everything else important.
Step 1.5) Uber implements a fleet of autonomous vehicles to replace the need for drivers.

Steps 3 and 4 are no longer relevant.
To continue the Chrome for Android tangent, you can re-enable zoom-in as an accessibility feature.
This is highly relevant to my interests. Also, looks to be the philosophy of intelligence, not just computer science.

Highlights from the table of contents:

9.3 John Searle: Anything Is a Computer . . . . . 360

9.3.5 Everything Is a Computer . . . . . . . . . . 367

9.7 What Else Might Be a Computer? . . . . . . . .375

9.7.1 Is a Brain a Computer? . . . . . . . . . . . .376

9.7.2 Is the Universe a Computer? . . . . . . . . . 377

Spoilers: you might be a computer, inside a computer.
Dietary cholesterol is bad for you.
Interesting, but I see one major problem with AI decision provenance being cases that mirror "Who sunk the boat" and "the straw that broke the camel's back". When you are integrating loads of sensory inputs to make a decision even if you have the best provenance, when you have any system based on a threshold you will encounter these cases where the information contained within the system itself is insufficient to reconstruct the cause of a failure. These are exceptionally hard problems and often require recognizing that we don't need to know the cause of something for certain but we need to identify the larger context which allowed that state to be arrived at in the first place so that we can prevent it in the future.
Just display a warning notice on every page, where the user has to click "Yes, I agree with the tracking cookie". That will solve the problem.
Not true. Many cars come with adaptive cruise control to prevent you running into the car ahead. And cruise control is seemingly quite safe as its been around for decades with largely no issues.

I drive entirely using cruise control to ensure compliance with speed limits.
The software exists today to allow a production VW Golf with stock sensors to self drive on the highway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHyw58hn4sM

This stuff is coming fast...
Reading road signs is exceedingly tricky. It's not just the OCR, there's plenty of other gotchas. e.g. what if you miss a road sign because you were overtaking a truck when the sign went past?

Road signs also have situational contexts. e.g. in the UK there are road signs indicating a max speed for an upcoming sharp bend (or series of bends) in the road. There isn't always a matching speed limit sign after the bend because drivers are assumed to work that out for themselves. But will the cars do so? Or will your self-driving car get stuck at the lower speed?
As an experienced programmer who started using R in the early days I feel that dealing with its quirks got me ready for the current modern languages
The improvements in traffic flow gained through full automation may even offset the decreased speed limits.
Interesting approach.
There's outsourcing and there's outsourcing. There may be fewer companies trying to build internal applications using contractors on another continent, but it seems like more companies are getting rid of data center operations in favor of services like AWS.
Very interesting given Astro Teller's (Google X) perspective on partial-self-driving cars:

"The assumption that humans can be a reliable backup for the system was a total fallacy." "It made us change our whole path."

https://youtu.be/3e0c0rL00bg?t=41m25s
Really? Have you looked at any 'new driver' manuals? I'm reminded of the time I came out of school to see two motorcycle cops hiding behind my jeep, using it as a blind to catch speeders.

"Hey, is it a school day?"

"No, we take a couple days off before exams."

"Oh. It's a good thing then that we haven't ticketed anyone."

"But doesn't the law say 'normal school day'? It is a friday."

"Ya, but your school ain't normal."
> The startling thing is how often the founders themselves don't know. Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead.

This accurately reflects my own experience. Most common pitfall: converting VC capital to users at a rate that will not sustain the company once the VC capital runs out. So many companies fall into this particular trap that it should have a name of its own.

Bought growth is only worth it if the users remain long enough to make back the money you pumped into them at the time of acquisition in net profits otherwise you might as well do without them.

I'm not sure if the reference to airbnb helps, whatever they did, they're an outlier and simply doing what they did without carefully evaluating your reasons is going to work about as well as any other cargo-cult strategy to success, it would be (a lot) more useful to see this point expressed in an alternate form, start-ups funded by YC in cohorts of months from when they started hiring besides the founders compared to their survival rate.
> There are plenty of apps that are guilty of this as well. Instagram comes immediately to mind.

For native apps it's a design choice. For whatever reason (good or bad) they don't want you to zoom in.

For websites instead, pinch to zoom exists for a design deficency, mostly for web pages not optimized for small sized screen. Responsive web design is helping but the gap is not filled yet. Hopefully it's just a matter of time and we'll experience beautiful mobile websites.

For all other needs, there is OS assistive zoom.
Pilotless helicopter tested for wildland firefighting
Sounds profound until you get into actually defining what a computer is. Re the computational theory of mind:

"A “computational theory of the mind” is along the same lines as having “a computational theory of the weather”, in which the earth is seen as a computer and the weather what it computes. It’s a metaphor that gives the illusion of understanding, without telling us whether tomorrow will rain or not — akin to using élan vital to “explain” life or scansoriality to “explain” propensity to climbing."

http://researchblogs.cs.bham.ac.uk/thelablunch/2015/07/what-...
Videos are starting to show up on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yCAZWdqX_Y

VERY impressive.
> €169

:(
Is there enough metal in those that a strong electromagnetic (say, like the one in this device) could rip it out of your skin...?
Ultimately, I think it's not very different.

In a Cliffs-notes sense, both vehicles seem to offer an autonomous driving mode in normal conditions. Like any other competitors, they both have a few unique features that are neat but don't really change the overall experience exponentially.

To be clear, I own neither a Tesla or a Mercedes currently and I'm basing this just on looking over the specs, but they appear to be fundamentally comparable.
Hey, there's now Mac install instructions in the README. Check them out and if you have any issues let me know.
An example may be useful. Suppose I tell you that I have written an Ethereum contract whereby people can loan me money, and after a year, I will pay them back double. Before you enter into one such contract with me, I hope it would cross your mind to wonder if I might actually be running a Ponzi scheme. Don't worry, I say, Ethereum has this gas feature that means the transaction will always halt. How much more confident should that information make you feel?

Again, it has nothing to do with gas.
You just need to review/audit the contract's source and EVM code and be sure it doesn't have backdoors.

For simplicity, you can think about Ethereum Transaction as an RPC call to Ethereum contract, where in addition to arguments (Data), you can also transfer a monetary value (in Ether) and provide fuel (Gas) for contract execution. Gas price (in Ethers) serves the same function as Bitcoin Tx fee.

Gas mechanism is just an implementation detail.

EDIT:

Regarding the contract example you mentioned "unsecured loan", I'm not sure it can be implemented as a "Self-enforcing contract", which is a proper term for "Smart Contracts". If a contract depends on your will or ability of repaying the loan, then it's not a self-enforcing contract. Somebody need to provide a collateral. It doesn't make sense for you to put up a 1001 Ether collateral to take 1000 Ether loan.

With smart property represented on the Blockchain you will be able to put up your car or apartment as a collateral for a loan, then it can be made self-enforceable. But it's not there yet.

The only way I can see for it to be implemented is with your own token, which will be devaluated each time somebody not repaying the loan in full.
How Walmart Thrives When America Is in Pain
Awesome!

In not totally unrelated news, I just finished reading Greg Egan's 'Orthogonal' trilogy (alien (as in really alien, alternate-universe cosmology and physics) multi-generational epic). The Feynman-type diagrams in the last book helped make sense of the weird physics.
I would make that series of if-statements more obviously deterministic, for starters. One way of accomplishing that would be a bunch of nested if-else blocks. However, that would be ugly. I'd prefer something like continue statements -- which would necessitate redesigning the loop to avoid bypassing the code at the bottom. Either way, the way this currently gives the appearance of being possibly nondeterministic makes me uncomfortable... and besides, executing those extra conditionals wastes CPU cycles.
That sounds interesting at first, but then what happens if say, the element takes you to another page? Then you'd have to go back a page, which would be a clunky experience.
We tried using various for an all we developed and its results were fairly poor, so we had to switch to bing.
People are getting shot by toddlers on a weekly basis this year
As would an MRI, presumably.
I would say Haystack looks a bit more complex. To me, Bullet looks more like a modern caching server.
I probably wouldn't have bothered to read this if I was using a mobile device as BBC.com is one of the worst offenders in regards to this problem.
Or full automation might increase the number of vehicles and exacerbate the problem. (On the assumption that the vastly reduced cost of fielding driveless vehicles could result in many more commercial vehicles on the road.)
Jamming WiFi Using Cheap USB Dongles
> I can't see any scale where they are profitable

What are your calculations? Square, Stripe et al are making massive margins on debit card transactions right now. Thanks to recent regulations (the Durbin amendment), the average debit interchange fee is 0.89% all included.[1] Square charges 2.75%. That means they're netting around 1.5-2% on debit transactions. That's huge for a payment processor.

Sure, they have higher costs for credit cards, and their easier sign-up probably means more losses from seller-side fraud. But if they can control fraud then 2.75% is still a healthy gross margin even on credit transactions. And it's crazy big margin for debit.

[1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/regii-average-i...