skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to mention the horror of inventing and deploying an efficient binary packed web execution format, only to slow things down even further in 5 years by seeing webpages load myGC_v1.2.5 + myGC_v1.3.1 + nuGC_v2.1.3 etc etc
7 insights from a year of talking with designers
The new gTLD info for Monday
A GIF’s frame rate is not equal to its video source’s frame rate
> Will the car be able to measure the depth of snow on the road? And find the most driveable part of the road? The high reflectivity of snow probably isn't a good ally for this use case.

Use a thermal camera to find the road? Or perhaps contrast, as the parts of the road with less slow should have roadway peek through. To determine how much snow you're dealing with, you detect wheel slip, which can assist in determining depth.
I also collect data, from the very high-brow critics in Cannes, and recently also Sundance for comparison.

https://cannes-rurban.rhcloud.com/

What is evident is that very often critics gather to champion objectively awful movies. Even for professional movie critics standards awful movies.
Looks for example at the surprising success of this years "Carol" and "The Assassin" in Cannes and their disappointing acceptance in the real world. Well, "Carol" is one of those special needs cases, which still has some champions left over.
And compare it to the exceptional Cannes movies this year: Dheepan, Umimachi Diary and Embrace of the Serpent. The critics didn't appreciate them and didn't see it coming. However the professional festival programmers and jury in the followup festivals saw it.

But the same happens almost every year. "ADIEU AU LANGAGE" (Godard) highest rated movie 2014, "HOLY MOTORS" (Leos Carax) 2012, "Le Havre" (Aki Kaurismaki) 2011, "FILM SOCIALISME" (Jean-Luc Godard) 2010.
The jury votes are usually much better than the critics votes.

Comparing quality to quantity (advertising budget, imdb ratings) makes no sense at all.
This is the very early signs of a trend that is going to grow - the conversion of private conquest of the Internet into public goods.

Google has two huge advantages in search - they have scraped links off every web page, which can be replicated (see Bing, DuckDuckGo) and they have user behaviour visiting those pages (did they immediately return to results page after hitting ,#1?)

There are good arguments to be made that both data sets are public goods, and indeed that it was unfair to use user generated content / data without licensing

There are of course arguments to the contrary. but googles jewels are too valuable to be left alone for lomg
Code for recent post about PDF from a Python pipeline
You want to live in a bubble, good for you. Give me freedom or give me death. I'd bet most of the people who are hard for these cars don't even own them, they just don't want to deal with taxi drivers anymore.
Yeah, but not 15+ within a week, is my thought.
You can run virtual machines in z/VM, but you can also partition the machine at the firmware level. (Partitions are called "Logical Partitions" or LPARs.) Maybe that was what they meant by "bare metal virtualization".
It better not be a one-time precomputed step since the roads changes constantly. I'm pretty sure I've never tried to precompute placement of items in a dynamic system.
Though I'm certainly saddened to hear David Bowie has died, I think his death is absolutely off-topic for HN. Yet compare the number of points and comments this thread has with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10832624 or this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10557793

It seems like HN's content is becoming less and less technical over time and much more political and social, and this thread is a great example. I've also noticed more and more "agenda pushers" posting here, people who can't contribute on the technical threads but aggressively upvote and comment on the non-technical threads.

I was about to suggest new, clearer guidelines restricting much of this non-technical content to reverse the decline, but according to the current guidelines, it seems like it's already prohibited:

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

Maybe stricter enforcement would be in order (dang? jascquesm?)
> Do you believe that security software or browsers are better writen in other languages than C/C++?

Yes. And lots and lots of apps (most public network facing things) are security sensitive.

> Please think of some well known Perl and PHP applications and their security record.

Nobody is saying that "memory safe == no vulnerabilities". I do think it's true that being memory unsafe results in many more vulnerabilities. I've measured this precise statistic in our bug tracker.

> That's because correct C-style memory management never† scales up to large software projects in a way that doesn't result in crashes and, worse, vulnerabilities.

It's true. And I work in native code myself!

It's only an insult if you presuppose that introducing vulnerabilities reflects badly on the programmer who introduced them. I don't believe that; most major vulnerabilities I've seen were introduced by very good programmers. It's a problem with the tools they're working with.
“Robotic falcon” can capture, retrieve renegade drones
Zika virus: a new global threat for 2016
The important text there was "the entire grid." Meaning the numbers of cars is sufficiently small we can assume it to be 0.
> I hope the Tor Project has information on the attack is looking into ways to mitigate this. But if it's due to the protocol nature, then maybe it's time to look for a successor (we aren't using WEP anymore, right?)

The attacks on Tor are largely in the form of:

A) Outright implementation flaws [e.g. Software bugs ]

B) Malicious actors deploying Tor nodes [e.g. On July 4 2014 we found a group of relays that we assume were trying to deanonymize users. They appear to have been targeting people who operate or access Tor hidden services. The attack involved modifying Tor protocol headers to do traffic confirmation attacks.
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-security-advisory-relay... ]

> A traffic confirmation attack is possible when the attacker controls or observes the relays on both ends of a Tor circuit and then compares traffic timing, volume, or other characteristics to conclude that the two relays are indeed on the same circuit. If the first relay in the circuit (called the "entry guard") knows the IP address of the user, and the last relay in the circuit knows the resource or destination she is accessing, then together they can deanonymize her. You can read more about traffic confirmation attacks, including pointers to many research papers, at this blog post from 2009:

Pretty much the only defense is to control the entry nodes you use yourself by:

https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq.html.en#EntryGuards

> Restricting your entry nodes may also help against attackers who want to run a few Tor nodes and easily enumerate all of the Tor user IP addresses. (Even though they can't learn what destinations the users are talking to, they still might be able to do bad things with just a list of users.) However, that feature won't really become useful until we move to a "directory guard" design as well.

Its an inherent problem with a low latency anonymity network that is really an open research problem.

However, controlling your entry nodes has a different problem:

1) It pretty clearly links you to you entering the tor network via a consistent sent of nodes.

2) Capturing these nodes via the DC and warrants/legal action has been done in the past. As any is going to be able to find these nodes since they are no longer randomly selected...

3) Once you are actively targeted you are just as vulnerable.
Its one thing, and expected, for the car to look for signs, but if self-driving cars all need perfect maps which I didn't know was a necessity then I don't see them being practical.
For http://Clara.io, we explored a bunch of headless gl solutions and none worked. It may have changed by now. But even if you got a headless gl solution working, it likely would have poor extension support, which means the results will suffer anyhow. :(
Crap. Why does it even work on my system?
No, discover Meteor is extremely outdated.
The set of people who have enough expertise to innovate in GC above and beyond what current browser JS engines do would fit in one small conference room. And most of those folks already work on browser JS engines. :)
It is nice for fun or digital archaeology, but the last freely available version of MVS was released ca. 1978... But it is nice to get a feeling of what the system is like.
I got that he was trying to say something along the lines of "more code = more maintanance"... but code is simply not a liability. (Yeah, I have a natural urge to correct stuff that's incorrect, but that's not an uncommon trait.)
Android apps work pretty well with mouse, on desktop.

No! No they absolutely don't!

Almost every Android app is clearly design for use on a touch device. Every aspect of the design is intended to be touch-first. That's totally fine – but the fact that they can be used with a mouse on a desktop does not mean that they work pretty well. The user interface paradigms are really very different.
>"this empirical research is wrong because my unsubstantiated theorizing is right."

The empirical research isn't "wrong", that doesn't even make sense. Data is just data, it stands for nothing but itself, it must be interpreted for one to make a grander statement about reality.

I'm saying your and enraged_camel's interpretation of the data is wrong -- which is no less scientific a position, and no more unsubstantiated. We're both examining the data, which itself has no opinion, and making predictions about what that data represents given a number of imperfect heuristics.

That's how science works.
Why? It's functionally equivalent (at least for now) to asm.js, which is just a subset of JavaScript.
A CSS fixing the layout on Firefox based on your solution: https://gist.github.com/skarap/15bf77d63fe596ee55ce . Use Stylish (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/) to load it.
Had forgotten to include the code in the earlier post:

Generate PDF from a Python-controlled Unix pipeline

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2016/01/generate-pdf-from-python...

so wrote a supplementary post with just the code added. See link in title of this thread.
OP said:

> I have tried emailing the Google Maps team to plead my case, but my correspondence went unanswered.

Where did they write?

How many times did they write?

How long ago did they write?

Did they try any other means of contact?

Did they try to go through, as only one example, linkedin and find someone
that way (or any other way of researching a party that might
be willing to help)?

It's unclear the effort that was put in here. Maybe it was maybe it wasn't. We don't have enough detail. Simply saying "my correspondance went unanswered" as much as we may think Google doesn't care doesn't prove that point.

I actually from time to time write to companies to try and sell them things. I put in effort and it appears that that greatly increases the chance that they will buy what I am trying to sell to them (meaning a decision maker not a clerk or the person who sorts thorough the spam). And email more than one time for that matter. And if it's really important try a phone call.
Every time a Google / Tesla / Ford / GM / Toyota self-driving car passes down a road in normal conditions, it will be mapping the surroundings in fairly intricate detail.

Based on GPS + Lidar + other sensors, the roadway and surroundings will be mapped to within centimeters -- which should make navigating during inclement conditions fairly straight-forward.

These systems might fail on snowy roads that have never been traversed previously, but what percentage of driving is performed on roads with hundreds/thousands of cars passing every day? 99.9%? 99.99%?
Yes, why will the birth rate go up if the cost of raising children remains high and China's economy appears to be slowing down? These are macroeconomic signs of lower birth rates, not higher.
This ambiguity is why "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" avoids the term "closure" when talking about free variables in a procedure.

https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/2_002e2.xhtml#FOOT72
LLCs do not protect against tort liability. They'll pierce the veil. See Facebook v. Power Ventures, Inc., where the founder was found personally liable for 3 million dollars in damages despite the fact that he was a) accessing Facebook on a specific user's behalf at their request and therefore was essentially a browsing device and b) was not violating copyright by any reasonable standard (Ticketmaster v. RMG is not reasonable) since the content he was downloading was owned by the user requesting the download.
You can give away your castle with a license indicating that nobody can keep you out, too, but that doesn't guarantee that it will be maintained so that you can keep using it, either.
If you look at the edits in the past month for emacs wiki and wikemacs, emacswiki is still the place to go:

http://wikemacs.org/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&da...

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs?action=rc;days=28;all=0;showe...
> How is that any improvement on any other language?

In Rust, outside of the std::vec module, unless you type "unsafe" there is no way to corrupt a vector that you have. In C++, that's quite easy: undefined behavior can corrupt anything, private fields or not.
1. Right now it tries to solve the problem of better multi-core scalability.
2. Additionally it tries to have a cleaner source base which should allow add in the future new features, such as persistence and replication.
I came across JooQ when looking for LINQ in Java. I believe that's the original inspiration
The park's on the other side of the second cluster of high-rises.
Which I guess is enough time to buy life insurance. At least your family won't have money problems. :-)
Electronic stability control is required by regulation in several jurisdictions (US, Canada, EU now or soon). From that it can be inferred that computers are better at some aspects of it already.
Even pre vertex buffers the OpenGL rendering pipeline was highly customizable, even the difference between phong and gauraud shading has deep impact on the triangle rasterizer inner loop. So basically you have jit all the way down, to see maximum performance in software.
A violation is a violation, period. Yeah maybe it sucks but it violates their terms, what do you expect? It's not going to be grandfathered in. No one does that because now you have exceptions to your terms of service. Likely it was a violation back in 2006 as well in which case there would obviously be no exceptions granted anyway.

It's not like Google had the website sitting in a queue to be checked for violations and it took a decade to get to it. They likely hadn't looked at it at all, didn't run an audit on it etc. Google is a big company, is it really that unreasonable that it may have taken a decade before finding the violation?
I remember reading this in high school. I remember thinking I was hot shit for knowing how a proxy works.

If only I'd done more than simply sneak past the firewalls.
and when they complain, what would the answer be?

Would there be a complain-button next to the deprecation warning?
This is already true for plenty of "compile-to-javascript" languages. The textual format of wasm should be as easy to read as the output of those languages, if not easier.
Nowadays we do get critical articles about programs like the Joint Strike Fighter, but often they seem a little bit besides the point, for example comparing it to seventies design paradigms. The lightweight fighter mafia is emphasizing dogfighting, visual identification and gun kills, from an era when missiles were very unreliable and there was no stealth.
I guess it would require a lot of expertise and access to rare information, to be able to evaluate the JSF on its own merits. Stillion and Sweetman have been the most interesting reads.

I think the problem with X-33 was that it was too big and risky for an experimental-only platform. If you want to develop things like aerospike engines or composite multilobe tanks, you should first have ground tests and then relatively small demonstrators using a lot of off the shelf technology. It makes no sense to bet so much stuff on a multi-faceted big expensive program that can fail when any of it components doesn't deliver.
Or if you want to build something big, either use proven technology or retire risk in smaller programs first.

I guess people were emulating Apollo and the Space Shuttle. They had high performance but were not flexible or low cost, for a reason.
LLVM features lots and lots of optimization passes. Simpler hand-written shader compilers typically don't.
Just move on to Open Street Maps.
Maybe I'm naive, but I just can't see how these NetSweeper people justify this to themselves.
Maybe not what you meant, but I immediately thought of SaaS. Or various companies' policies of open sourcing non-core software.

Both of those are along the lines of "I need code to do this thing, but I don't want to be the (sole) maintainer."

You could write your own language, IDE, OS, build system, source control, networking library, logging library, shopping cart, payment processor, etc.
For a self-driving car, programmed to follow traffic laws to the letter, an at-fault collision indicates a problem with the vehicle, either caused by a manufacturer defect (which includes software bugs) or by maintenance negligence by the owner. If an owner of a vehicle maintains it to the recommendations of the manufacturer, then any breakdowns also become manufacturer defects.

If a company owns a fleet of vehicles, and maintains them according to the manufacturer's recommendations, it is now impossible for them to be liable. A collision is always either the fault of the manufacturer or of another vehicle. Therefore, the owner of the vehicles need not have insurance. (This is not the current legal situation, but I expect that it would be in a few years.)

An individual person who owns a self-driving car would have exactly the same situation as above, provided they maintain the car to the recommended standard. In an attempt to deny a claim, the manufacturer would have the ability to argue that the vehicle was not maintained to standard, in which case the person would be liable for the results of that negligence.
> In contrast to this, most of my paper notes (and I've gone back to paper) end up being lost, and those that aren't lost are horribly disorganized.

Conversely, I've had lots of PDAs through the years, and any notes I took on them were lost long ago.
My understanding is that it 'looks for signs', if it expects them to be there. Obviously, it has to look at the stoplight to see what color it is. But it won't look at arbitrary space for a stoplight it isn't told exists.

Source, by the way: slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.html

FWIW, a Googler has done a TED talk about having the car recognize police officers holding signs and temporary things like that, more recently, so they may have made strides in solving this problem.

But at it's core, the Self-Driving Car Project seems way too reliant on Google's cloud servers for my taste. I'd love to have a self-driving car, but it needs to be self-driving, not Google-driving.
Exactly. Apart from anything else, we already have HTML. Why would you want to write a lowest common denominator UI that only targets the Apple ecosystem?

You'd be getting neither the benefits of native nor the benefits of cross-platform.
North of 59th might as well be Yonkers.
Once cars have better connectivity it may be easier. Assuming busy traffic you could follow the average track of the last n cars etc.
Banishing 'Get Windows 10' nagware isn't as easy as you think
There was an article on the history of Internet standards that I really liked that noted the most effective and adaptable standards had all essentially been API-like rigidly-defined-but-simple boundaries.

The relationship between WASM and JS seems to be "js/js virtual machines are a de facto standard, so let's not repeat the mistakes of Java plugins and instead build off that foot-in-the-door."
the entire higher education system is a fraud and a sham. no one current events are such events and so current.

you've done this to yourselves.
From a practical standpoint, why would you not try to pass the certification process first with a bare-bones, minimally viable service designed specifically to pass certification? Then iterate on top once it is in.
The Evolutionary Ecology of Cancer: An Interview with Athena Aktipis
In 5 years I never had an accident, crash or any semi-dangerous or dangerous situtation during hard rains, snows, snowstorms. I'm not ok with 99.99%
Having worked in the memory chip business for 10 years: It's cheap!! Hell, for a while, companies were dumping memories below cost.

I remember a Fry's newspaper ad that said something like: "$50 1GB DIMM, $0 after in-store discount. (Limit 2 per customer.)"

Kind of similar to the old (and possibly apocryphal) Sun Microsystems legend: Frustrated that too many domestic programmers were spoiled with ample CPU speeds, they hired a bunch of Russian programmers who dealt with the export restrictions on computing gear and thus had learned to write tight, elegant code.
I'm not convinced. Nowhere is the categorical view more visible than in Haskell and yet some of their most advanced libraries are designed for providing OOP constructs, e.g. lenses. Another thing is The dreaded monad. Even though it provides denotational semantics in the categorical setting for various side-effecting constructs the thing is inherently non-compositional.

Like all things in programming the truth is a little more subtle than just saying category theory is the right approach for structuring programs. I'm with Felleisen and Sussman when it comes to these things: Types are stupid and most of these things are useless when it comes to reasoning about large and complex dynamic systems.
Your hypothetical is missing the part where the rocket pods tear the B-52 apart and a flaming ball of debris falls to earth.

You see, to accelerate straight up (or nearly so) your thrust must be greater than your weight. To get enough acceleration to be useful, you usually need an amount of thrust that's more like 1.2x your mass. For example, the fully loaded Saturn V weighed about 6,500,000 lbs and the first stage had 7,650,000 lbs of thrust.

So your fully loaded B-52 (~265,000 lbs) needs around 320,000 lbs of thrust from the rockets. This is more than double the amount of thrust produced by the jet engines. By the time you've accounted for your rocket engines, strengthened the airframe to survive the rocket thrust, and added a reaction control system (to turn around for deceleration), you've lost a good chunk of your 35 tons of rocket fuel.

It's about this time you realize that even 35 tons of rocket fuel is a laughably small amount. A single space shuttle main engine is a bit more powerful than what you'd need (~420,000 lbs of thrust), but it's good enough for ballpark numbers. It will consume 35 tons of fuel in about a minute... meaning your mission profile is probably something like 30 seconds of vertical acceleration, 15 second horizontal acceleration, 15 seconds horizontal deceleration. Not enough to take you very high or very far.

It's not that we can't do it, it's that it's woefully inefficient.