skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Pratt is clearly talking about the difference between Level 4 and Level 5 in his first two answers

No, Pratt is saying that manufacturers are hyping level 4 as being around the corner, but it is not. Pratt does not think the claims for level 4 are sufficiently backed up:

"...That’s Level 4. And I wouldn’t even stop there: I would ask, “Is that at all times of the day, is it in all weather, is it in all traffic?”

> Level 4 doesn't require driver attention, it just requires the driver to be (instantly?) available if the system has a problem

How exactly would that work? You don't have to be attentive but you must be available to take over?

At any rate, this is not the definition provided by the Society of Automotive Engineers [1], which is the definition NHTSA has adopted for levels of autonomous vehicles.

SAE says for level 4:

"the driving mode-specific performance by an automated driving system of all aspects of the dynamic driving task, even if a human driver does not respond appropriately to a request to intervene"

In other words, the system could request human intervention, but it will still do something even if the human does not respond.

Wikipedia appears to have either summarized this in different words or has a different version.

> this change-over is the situation that Pratt worries about in his fourth answer.

I wholeheartedly agree with Pratt that "In some ways, the worst case is a car that will need driver intervention once every 200,000 miles..."

[1] https://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf
> In practice, we as a society value stopping fraud and terrorist funding quite a bit more than rooting out every last Jeffrey Dahmer

You say "we as a society" but then posit something ridiculous. Regular everyday murderers kill orders of magnitude more Americans than terrorists. They are monsters of the same order and there are more of them. How is it that we have stood to tolerate them for centuries, but now this new threat (which is not actually new at all) suddenly requires a departure from our longstanding principles?

Terrorism isn't new, it isn't unique, it doesn't require an extraordinary response unlike that of every other category of bad in the world. It's just the boogey man du jour that has recently become highly profitable for a wide variety of fear mongers and demagogues.

Don't fear the terrorists. You're letting the terrorists win.
Human drivers kill more than 30000 people a year in the US alone. It's not about saving "even one life", self-driving cars would have to be pretty terrible to reach those numbers.
I think that's reserved for neglect.
Exactly! And that's a large part of why I'd feel more comfortable if the car pulled over. (I could imagine a future vehicle pulling over and asking "should I try to continue going slowly, or do you want to wait until conditions improve?")
I think it's about as important now as the clockwork was in the 19th, or the computer was in the 20th century. We make these fundamental discoveries about how the world works, and then there is a period where that metaphor is used to gain subatantially new understandings in every field.

We are just starting to absorb quantum ideas: non-causality, waveform collapse, etc. We'll spend the next decades seeing how those ideas can change our understanding of all kinds of things. Then the metaphor will go in our knapsack with all the others.

In that sense you are both right. He's right that the quantum metaphors are very important right now. You're right that they are just some of many.

You're probably more right than he is though. Most important "of all time" is almost certainly wrong.
Or an extension that understands how to parse many different news sites and can filter out stories on all of them. Add one keyword (pick your own example ;) and see no headlines containing that keyword on any news site. It wouldn't be that hard, though it would reinforce one's own news bubble.
Google started stealing content a long time ago on their search page... sometime displaying almost whole pages of content as the first "search result" so that the user doesn't even need to visit the source.
How did they manage to make a Chrome extension that works on Mac but not Linux? Chrome extensions can't contain platform native code, and Chrome doesn't support other kinds of plugins anymore.
Nice perspective, thanks.
Approximately 35,000 people died in car accidents in 2015. That's almost 100 people each day. Imagine you had self-driving car that was exactly as good as humans. This car will kill 100 people each day despite of being human-level competent. It has slim chance of surviving public outrage and lawsuits. This points to the fact that self-driving cars needs to be few thousand times better than humans. As in all machine learning problems, as you get along the curve, progress becomes much more expensive for next 1% improvement than last 2% improvement.

One way to circumvent this is establish special lanes for self-driving cars where things are much more controlled, well defined and cars in that lane can communicate with each other to avoid crashes. Long segments of highways might be great candidates. This can heat up the virtuous cycle where people buy self-driving cars to be in that lane which pressures authorities to make more lanes available for them and eventually most lanes are for self-driving cars.
There have been more than just the one fatality. I know of at least one other, but who knows if that's the extent. And there have probably been plenty of crashes and injuries.
Diagnostics manuals and schematics are currently illegally obtained by third party repairers (if they are available); if this was made legal it would potentially have far more value than the ability to freely purchase replacement parts.
Well shit. Thanks for pointing that out. I'll revise.
Google’s LG-made Android Wear 2.0 watches possibly revealed in low-res photo
I don't think so, mostly because I don't think a qualifying system would actually require an instant switch over. I can't find anywhere that it the timescale is defined; if I had to guess, I'd say it's defined in terms of whatever the minimum safe timescale is (empirically), i.e., Level 4 is whatever it needs to be to allow a human to read a book safely, but not necessarily sleep.

For instance, a Level 4 car probably can't deal with unexpected road construction, and might simply bring the car to a halt, smoothly but quickly. It would be dangerous if the driver was asleep and the car stopped dead on the highway for the 30 seconds it takes someone to wakeup and get oriented, but it could be pretty safe if the driver just needs to look up from their movie and grab the wheel.

That's just speculation, though.
This is Toyota, which is coming from behind here. They started work on self-driving last summer, which was late to be getting into it. They hired Gill Pratt, who took over the MIT Leg Lab after Raibert left, but never did much with it. His job was to start to build up an organization to work on self-driving. So he has to make excuses for Toyota being behind.

Toyota recent technology direction isn't looking good. Instead of selling battery electric cars, they're selling hydrogen fuel cell cars in California.[1] Nobody is buying. Their electric cars are mini-cars. Something went wrong over there.

Pratt has some legitimate criticisms. But many of the really hard but rare problems can be solved by stopping, or going really slow. When you're going really slow, your sensor data from LIDAR is very good and you should have a full ground profile. If you have to inch your way through a field of rocks, that can be done. Remember, the DARPA Grand Challenge cars of 10 years ago could drive off road.

As for "why did it do that" issues, that's mostly a problem for those self-driving systems where machine learning is connected directly between camera and steering wheel. Those are easy to build and give the illusion of working, but are not going to work in hard cases. You want a world model and object recognition, like Google. You can tell how well your object recognition is working by checking its results at long range against its results at short range.

[1] https://ssl.toyota.com/mirai/fcv.html
So I take it that neither you nor Elli Kaplan have home insurance?
> biding your time

They will see you coming long before you see them. They will have previously set up their reward system with you so it's a Mutually Assured Destruction relationship.
What's a duct-ape and how did you learn to control them?
Google Announce All Chromebooks debuting in 2017 and beyond will run Android apps
Link to actual article - https://cravingimprovements.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/what-se...
Apple Rolls Out iOS 10.2.1 Update, and  Why You Should Download It ASAP
Can Detroit Beat the Gentrification Game?
They have presence in every state. Granted in North Dakota, they may have only 1 office. Anywhere in the country, I'm traveling in and out of network, or find myself as an edge case with a weird situation, raped on a business trip in an unfamiliar city, I know they are there for me with unbiased medical service & care.

https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/local-state-offic...

I can't think of any other reproductive service public or private that has such nationwide coverage.

(Edit: sort of an afterthought... Planned Parenthood isn't the political football, it's the women in this country. I never hear about special restrictive legislation affecting the men who rely upon Planned Parenthood.)
The article was talking about Level 5 as a long way off but it also spent time talking about a lack of consistency in how these levels are applied [1]. Some systems might state they are Level 4 but that's only true for well mapped good weather locations so one might legitimately wonder if such a system is truly Level 4.

The article is mainly about: Level 5 as difficult, inconsistent application of Levels, the fact that rare difficult situations carry most of the valuable information for a learning system, preventing mismatched expectations, untenability of systems which require human attention and vigilance. The final point made was, instead of focusing on self-driving cars, focus on cars which complement human ability. For example, humans are good at theory of mind and inference in rich world models while machines are better at total situational awareness.

I'll add another. Self-Driving cars need models which at the very least, are able to capture uncertainty over predictions. This makes them more robust to glitching catastrophically in parts of the state space that are novel to them.

[1] > Yes, so NHTSA had 1 to 4, and SAE was very smart, they said we’ll take Level 4 and we’ll split it into two things, 4 and 5, and the difference is that Level 5 is everywhere at any time, and 4 is only some places at some times. But otherwise they’re basically the same. The SAE levels are fine, but people keep making mistakes. And so Level 2 systems are often called Level 3, which is wrong. A key thing of Level 3 is that the person does not need to supervise the autonomy. So no guarding of the machine by the human being.
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative acquires and will free up science search engine Meta
Widely used WebEx plugin for Chrome will execute attack code
Intuz Tops the Leader's Matrix as Cloud Computing Consultants
Hmm, I hope they got a good price. This doesn't really seem like a pain point for researchers (at least not for me). We are all pretty adept at using existing tools to find the papers we need to find. The bigger issue is time to properly read them.

That said, I like the idea of CZI acting as a hub for tool development that will enable all researchers broadly. There are a bunch of tools that are incredibly useful to making logistics of a lab simpler.

1. Lab management and logistics: quartzy and others

2. Online paper writing: overleaf and a few others

3. DNA Bashing: benchling et al

4. Bioinformatics: They could do a bunch here

I worry that a lot of things in this space right now will disappear pretty quickly once the VC gravy train runs dry. More importantly, I think this is something that CZI might have expertise to do well and sustainably.
Wow that is really weird.

Thanks for pointing that out. Should probably let them know.

UPDATE: I've let them know [0] and the root cause is simple.

[0] https://twitter.com/devstack/status/823762402382475265
Put this in .jupyter/custom/custom.js

require(['base/js/namespace', 'jquery'], function(IPython, $) {
$([IPython.events]).on('notebook_loaded.Notebook', function() {
$('#header-container').hide();
$('.header-bar').hide();
$('div#maintoolbar').hide();
IPython.menubar._size_header();
});
});
Ha-le-freaking-lujah! I've been saying the same for years, ever since I completed the Udacity self-driving car AI course (taught by Sebastian Thrun, then head guru of autonomous vehicle research at Google). 70% of the problem was solved in mid-90's, by Ernst Dickmanns et al, Daimler Benz had autonomous cars on the autobahn. After billions of dollars and two decades, we solved another 20% of the problem. The remaining 10% is not going to be conclusively solved in the next 20 years at least, not under the current constraints.

Now if roads are outfitted with instrumentation for autonomous vehicles, _and_ human drivers are prohibited on such roads, _then_ we _might_ see full autonomy. But not before.

If it were up to me, I'd focus on this instrumentation instead: RF guide wires/tags for car localization on the pavement, machine readable signage (even in fog, snow, and heavy rain -- conditions with which cameras and LIDARs cannot deal in principle), inter-car coordination mesh networks and security thereof, autonomous vehicle readable road work signage, police gear to direct traffic of autonomous vehicles, and so on and so forth. There. Hundred billion dollars worth of startups in one paragraph.

As things stand, you can only be fully autonomous at 25mph in California where it never rains, as long as there's no fog, no road work, and no one has messed up the markings on the pavement.
Love the artwork!
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a viable deployment strategy. The routers would necessarily need to ask for the domain name in question to be pointed at their internet-facing, public IP (if indeed they even have one!), because that's all that Lets Encrypt could possibly verify, but the administration interface is usually on a private RFC1918 address. And what secure protocol are you going to use for the router to request that domain name update?

And how is first time setup supposed to work anyway? You need to connect to the administration interface to give it your ISP credentials before it can connect to the internet and obtain its Lets Encrypt certificate.

If you forget about Lets Encrypt and instead point hundreds of thousands of router-<serial>.vendor.com addresses at 192.168.0.1, with a pre-made certificate, you then only have the problems of baking an individual private key into each router at the factory and boxing customised documentation (like maybe a sticker on the router itself) telling the user what the unique domain name is they need to setup their device. Oh, and the problem of what to do when the user wants to change the local address used by their router.
How about QuiPasse?
> This land by the way will cost you approximately $7,183 per acre.

That's surprisingly cheap. A farm near me, with similar production capabilities, recently sold for $25,000/acre. Around here, you won't find anything really worth farming for much under $15,000/acre on the low end these days.
> 1. Identify what it means to be good

https://dimitrov2k.wordpress.com/2017/01/22/what-does-it-tak...
Was looking through our alumni magazine this weekend. This section [0] really caught my attention. Massive props to the Prof. That said, seriously nice donation.

"In 1984, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)’s donation of $24 million provides the University of Waterloo with eight new VAX machines — on the condition that work created using the machines would be the property of DEC.

Wes Graham, a professor of computer science, stopped the shipment until the company agreed to Waterloo’s policy of leaving intellectual property in the hands of its inventors."

[0] https://uwaterloo.ca/magazine/fall-2016/feature/60-years-inn...
What Marketing Channel Should You Start with First
Makes me wonder whether they launched Fi to get their pool of phone numbers un-blacklisted because now some people have only that number and no others.
They're waiting because they'll copy the right technology (they're basically saying they won't offer anything less than Stage 5 which is smart) from competitors when it happens and becomes economically feasible. I don't think they're going to run out to make Corollas with 20K LIDARs slapped on just yet. Give it time. Tesla likes to brag, but honestly a little steering now and then doesn't count. With this tech, I think all-or-nothing is the safest approach given you're not a research power-house like Google. Let someone else stumble upon the solution then copy it.
There was a great BBC doc a few years ago (2009) called "A Farm for the Future". It was about someone from a traditional farming family discovering/researching/interviewing around permaculture. In one of the interviews she mentions that traditionally she can feed 5 people an acre, whilst the interviewee was claiming 10+. I believe permaculture has come along in leaps and bounds since, so it is well worth reading up on.
> "...That’s Level 4. And I wouldn’t even stop there: I would ask, “Is that at all times of the day, is it in all weather, is it in all traffic?”

But that doesn't actually contradict stale2002 or diminish the enormous potential economic importance by more than (say) a factor of 2. Level 4 systems that are available to use 60% of the time are still revolutionary, and compatible with both stale2002's and Pratt's comments.

> How exactly would that work?

See my comment to function_seven for my speculation. Although I used the Wikipedia definition, I believe everything I said is compatible with the definition from SAE you have quoted. In particular "the system could request human intervention, but it will still do something even if the human does not respond" does not conflict with "it just requires the driver to be available if the system has a problem" because the "something" the system may do is bring the car to a rapid (or even emergency) stop. This can become dangerous if the human can't resume control within a few seconds, but is an easily acceptable risk to occur once every 100k miles as a price of Level 4 autonomy.
Well, that describes every thinking thing, good or evil, that ever lived.

It just occurred to me, though, that 2061 (and its villains) do not have a coauthor, although I don't know why that's important to you. Sorry, but your claim that he didn't write villains is just a little silly, and his view of humanity was a little more complicated than "positive."

We haven't even got to the short stories. If you've got a few minutes, read Hate and reconsider your thesis: https://books.google.com/books?id=hbAqAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PT13&dq=h...
Does it count as stealing if websites opt into it?
For some reason, this made me think more of medieval castles, with Nuclear Silo condos replacing King Ludwig's mansions instead. I suppose they figure they won't need to add a courtyard for the peasants until after things settle down a bit.
Yeah it sets up pretty quick and they even have a free level.
Tesla is so hyped that 20MW/80MWh is bombastic news (by the wording in the article), a mean sized power plant is ~800MW. The grid is not interconnected ?
Can't they pump up a hydroheletric reservoir ?

I sure hope the new administration open the eyes for carbon sequestration and nuclear energy, US will be better and cleaner faster.
WebGL visualisation of global GitHub contributions
Not sure where you got the "less than or equal to a second old"? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean?

There is no single system-wide imposed sampling rate, so it's up to you to set the sampling rate based on what sort of queries you want to be able to do with good enough accuracy. We have 1:1 rate data for some things (say errors served on a particular service), while a ten or a hundred thousand to one data for other things where there are, say, tens of millions of log lines per second.
So Tesla's new technology is within a factor of 4 of the old technology before economies of scale.

That's pretty damn good actually.
Lizard Simulator
Super Bowl LI to Be Shot in Stunning 4K and 8K with 360 Degree Views
These pens are amazing.
Open sourcing the VS Test platform
It's been a while since I've looked at the actual numbers, but from what I recall (the point could be made over a reasonable approximation of X), >80% of the spoken words in an average english speaking adult's spoken language corpus exist in the vocabulary of the average english speaking kindergartner.

In other words, it takes us two-ish years to learn how to use our vocal cords, and another two to three years to get to 80% of an adult's vocabulary. And yet it takes another 12 years just to increase our vocabularies a handful of percent and to become fairly proficient at piecing together those words into coherent and mature enough communication for full time employment.

And that is just one example. Learn 90% of Haskell in one afternoon...learn the rest over the next two decades of your life. Learn 90% of derivatives trading from one book, but spend the rest of your life learning the rest. They aren't examples so much as they are a fact of life: There is an extremely long tail to learning, and extrapolation of where you will be given how fast you've learned up to some arbitrary point will be impossible.

Self driving cars aren't just learning the rules of the road. They are learning human spatial sensory perception and fast heuristics for ad hoc path planning that have been evolved over several millenia. And yes, they are becoming extremely capable extremely quickly...but you won't be able to extrapolate linearly to get to a point where they can take over.
> Do we have any technology (independent of cost) existing today to have a fully automated farm?

From a grain farmer's perspective, the modern equipment you get nowadays is practically fully automated already. However, that's the fun part of the job! While I do get excited about the automation, I am also in no huge rush to take away the human touch completely. After all, I farm because I want to be out in the field.

But keep in mind that the field work is also just a small part of the farm operation. Much of the work happens back in the office. I don't see that being automated any time soon, at least no more than any other business could be completely automated.
Most S-W types in programming jobs act that way because they don't have the aptitude for programming but for whatever reason ended up somehow in a programming job. They are mentally incapable of doing programming work, so act as S-W because that's the only choice available to them, short of quitting to do another type of job.
Export Selective Visio Shapes in Output Formats, Enhanced VSDX to PDF Conversion
Somewhat related : Wrote a chrome extension [1] to reduce some noise on twitter. It should be easy to add the ability to filter out tweets by keyword (I'll do it probably this weekend if it is useful).

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackybird/ddlhmpom...
It looks like some of these changes could be implemented as a Chromium extension that toggles these settings in Chrome.

Mozilla and Tor are working to upstream many of Tor's privacy changes into the Firefox code base. Even if the features are disabled in Firefox for now, having the code already in Firefox will make Tor's work easier because they don't need to reapply bitrotted patches. They just need to toggle an about:config pref. This Tor blog post has more information about the upstreaming collaboration:

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-heart-firefox