skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You'll have to make an attempt, because I don't see anything contradictory. If human drivers are your null hypothesis, than you cannot use the fact that "humans are bad" as a blanket acceptance of autonomous vehicles.

I said, "I admit that there just aren't enough autonomous cars on the road to prove conclusively that autonomous cars are safer than human-operated cars at this point." and I've vocally criticized autonomous cars elsewhere, so I'm not sure where you get the idea that I favor a blanket acceptance of autonomous vehicles.

I'm not saying that autonomous vehicles are safer, I'm saying this isn't evidence that autonomous vehicles are less safe.

> One huge difference between individual humans and autonomous vehicles is that we can reasonably argue that any Uber vehicle would have performed the same in this scenario.

I disagree: you can argue that the autonomous vehicles will behave the same given the same inputs, but they will never have exactly the same inputs even if the situation were identical to a human observer, so that's a fairly moot point. If you step back to a larger description of the situation (car crossing bike lane to get into a turn lane, car doesn't identify and avoid bicyclist in bike lane) then you are going to be looking at a percentage of the time where autonomous car will make a mistake. There's also a percentage of the time where a human driver will make the same mistake. The only way you can compare the safety autonomous cars to human drivers in this situation is to compare those percentages. And that's ignoring the fact that there are thousands of other situations in driving--even if autonomous cars fail 100% of the time in this situation, there may be enough other situations where they perform better enough than human drivers that they're safer. Simply saying that a car made a mistake in this situation doesn't give us any information at all.
I would also like to question the definition of “hard”. What does that mean?

Is it like the hard work of someone driven by enthusiasm and intrinsic motivation, in the state of flow? IN my experience that’s the most productive I can ever be. But it doesn’t feel hard at all.

Who and what defines the line where work becomes “hard work” and what is that extra unit worth?

I think it has a lot with the worker pushing beyond what is reasonable and sacrificing other important life aspects and needs they have in order to produce more units of work.

I find this immoral in any structure based on exploitation, which is most structures.
What about an ICO to fund a hostile takeover (coup)?

As in the coins would be for oil but you'd have to invade first. The ICO money would go towards funding a private army like Acadamy (Blackwater).

It may be possible to do it in such a way that there are fewer deaths than not doing it, and much of the local populace could be coopted by promising them stability and a portion of the treasure. The better the deal offered the cheaper and easier the takeover.

Just a thought.
Raytracing is sort of like nuclear fusion: a few years away for my entire life. Not clear what changed yet.
In path tracing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing), which is what the VFX industry uses primarily, both directions happen.
Wanting to leave IT
I'm 50 this year, been in IT for 20 years and I wanted to get ideas from those willing to share them on switching gears and leaving IT for something else.

I'll be frank: I'm burned out after 20 years of being in IT. IT, at least for me, due to the push to the cloud and other factors, has been reduced to disaster management. I live in a place with precious few actual IT jobs. I'd like to use computers as a tool, not the focus of my life.

My degree is in CS and before I was in IT, I was a barber--something I have no wish to return to, as standing all day created health issues for me, hence my entry into IT.

Any ideas?
You mentioned elsewhere that you haven't been asked any hard questions. So, here's the question: Does this 'quality' of art exist in the things which we observe? Or is it subjective, existing only in the observer?

Please think hard on this. Take as much time as you need. When you're ready, first write down your answer in as much detail as you like, to your own confidence. Then, pop open Pirsig's Zen and the Art, starting on p228, and read his thoughts and see what you think.
We don't throw jumping dummies in front of human students before we let them drive; why should machines be different?
Good point -- there's a 4% chance of fatality when struck by a 15mph car versus 20% at 30mph.

There's a 30mph city street near me where cars routinely go 45mph -- the fatality rate jumps up to 60% at that speed. So just having cars follow the speed limit would go a long way toward reducing fatalities.

https://www.propublica.org/article/unsafe-at-many-speeds
Personally, I have the opposite experience. It's likely because few of my IRL friends are on Twitter, but I like the commentary of the tech folks I follow. They seem to be on Twitter rather than Facebook. And since few of my friends use it, I don't feel the same "ego projection" pressure as I did on FB.

Sure, maybe I'm better off without either, but I think if you exercise some diligence you can craft a useful experience on most social platforms.
This company operated a spam compaign with emails harvested from GitHub or StackOverflow from what I can guess. Completely spoiled the first impressions.

This is not acceptable in 2018.

Not to mention the page was not accessible at that time due to load or whatever.
Beyond this, if Amazon was willing to participate, I'm pretty sure Google would let them in. However, knowing the companies from prior actions, there's no way in hell Bezos would ever allow that to happen.
This really sucks... I know companies that made forks of public (opensource) repo's just to have a "backup" in case the person or organisation decides to take down the repo. This should really be fixed as I don't see ANY benefit in the current way github handles this now. People talking about giving contractor's or other third party people access to later revoke them (after they are done) thinking they wont have a copy, are just plain simple wrong. Git is decentralised and the contractor/dev will always have his code on his machine unless HE decides to delete it.
Ask HN: How many side projects are you working on at once?
GroupMe is good for event planning and group chats.
This goes even deeper than that, I just listened to a Podcast called The Daily (from the NYT) which did a two part episode on the Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez. It would seem that Venezeula is quickly descending into an authoritarian state. As a point of illustration, the jailing of Leopoldo Lopez is one of the few things Obama and Trump both outspokenly agree.
>Why "except twitter?" I find Twitter to be 100x more toxic, 1% as useful, and infinitely worse design.

Twitter is all about your filter. I have mine curated to an amazing list of intelligent thoughtful, creative people who I enjoy seeing post every day, completely devoid of politics. As soon as you leave that bubble though, it's an absolute nightmare.
Indeed what? It's obvious that slower cars will kill fewer people. That's meaningless without saying what the cost of driving slower is.
IIRC the people who programmed the first auto pilot for a major airliner were required to be on board the first test flight, so I have to think their testing methodology was pretty meticulous.
"When I was in financial software (06-07) they were basically a joke"

I spent a few weeks causally reading testimony transcripts from the Madoff investigation when these were published by the SEC. The SEC was far worse than a joke. The SEC was an enabler. Years and years of Potemkin audits blessing Madoff and his Ponzi scheme as a worthy investment allowed hundreds of individuals and investors to rationalize their participation in the fiction. Complaints were filed, absurdities were pointed out and the SEC turned a blind eye to it all. By the time the gears finally stripped the SEC had had its nose rubbed in it multiple times.
Was that book Harrison Bergeron?
There is also the problem that in some areas (e.g. California) all intersections are crosswalks even if unlabeled. It's likely that most pedestrians cross in a crosswalk whether they know it or not.

Arizona has something similar:

> By legal definition, there are three or more crosswalks at every intersection whether marked or unmarked.

Source: ADOT Traffic Engineering Guidelines and Processes, Section 910.1
can this somehow work with autocad, etc so that construction fragments could be previewed in real time with Raytracing and global illumination turned on?
What counts as autonomous seems often to be inflated when considering positive statistics such as miles driven, and minimised when considering negative statistics such as fatalities.

At least, there needs to be agreed consistency before we can claim anything statistical.
Uber self-driving car kills Arizona woman, realizing worst fears of the new tech
> On what grounds do you have to argue that we shouldn't be pessimistic about the state of autonomous driving?

I didn't say that.

I'm not saying autonomous cars are safer, I'm saying that this accident doesn't prove autonomous cars are less safe.

> That you pulled out the IIHS stats without apparently bothering to look up the number of reported self-driving miles driven seems to suggest that you assumed that the fatality rate was obviously skewed against human driving.

I brought up the IIHS stats to show that merely reporting an accident in isolation from a full statistical model doesn't prove anything.
Where I live the law explicitly requires cars to take the bike lane before turning in this situation. It's probably better to separate the blind spot for bicycles check from the look for pedestrians and turn check.
Exactly, you can never reduce accident rates to zero, even if you slow to a crawl or stop (now you're endanger traffic behind you). Debris could fall on your car and make the steering non-responsive. A flat tire could burst at any speed and cause a bicyclist to veer into traffic/off a cliff/whatever.

When it comes to human drivers we deal with probabilities, but for some reason people want absolutes with autonomous ones.
Thanks for pointing that out, didn't see it earlier. Just to put it out here - no data/listings have been copied, I've been in touch with all owners directly, asked for permission etc.

It's my night time project, started solving my own problem that I experienced. I'm as much competition as Craigslist, Cars.com or any other site that lists electric vehicles.
Verizon’s Proposed New York Settlement Covers Up Monumental Accounting Scandal
Shebangs!
Scrapping H1B altogether, without advocating for a replacement program that would still allow those people to come here is extremely anti-immigrant, because you're saying those people should not have a path to come here.

"And yes, if you go around calling people "anti-immigrant" (like you just called me) and "racist" who normally should be your allies, you are helping elect candidates like Trump."

Only if those people are so childish that they cannot take a bit of criticism. And if a bit of criticism is all it takes for you to do an about face and join Trump, then you never believed in those positions to start with.
This may not have been an unexpected circumstance. The "pedestrian outside of the crosswalk" report is likely wrong. There is visual evidence that strongly supports that this was a case of the Uber hitting a bicyclist while merging into the right turn lane.

Here's a picture of the crumpled bicycle (note dent on the front right of the car): https://twitter.com/daiwaka/status/975767445859287042

The sign it is lying next to lets us locate the exact point of the collision on Google street view: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4370667,-111.9430321,3a,75y,...

It's right where the vehicle lane crosses the bike lane approaching the intersection. Very unlikely a pedestrian was walking a bike there. Much more likely the Uber hit the bicycle while merging.

EDIT: I take back "very unlikely" a pedestrian was crossing there. There is in fact a very weird "X" pathway in the median that pedestrians are not supposed to be in. I didn't see that until I looked at the satellite view.[1] So possibly she emerged from there and was walking her bike across the street. That still looks pretty bad for Uber though, since that street is a straight shot with clear visibility and the dent's on the right side of the car. Meaning it would have swerved left to avoid a late-detected obstacle rather than swerve right away from her entering the roadway. She also would have literally had to walk straight into oncoming traffic. I still think bicyclist is the most likely scenario and it's odd the PD doesn't mention the crumpled bicycle.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4365931,-111.9425027,198m/da... (street view shows a "no pedestrians" sign)
I've been saying this from the beginning: it's not enough for self-driving cars to be "better than the average driver". They need to be at least 10x better than the best drivers.

I find it crazy that so many people think it is. First off, by definition like 49% of the drivers are technically better than the "average driver".

Second, just like with "human-like translation" from machines, errors made by machines tend to be very different than errors made by humans. Perhaps self-driving cars can never cause a "drunken accident", but they could cause accidents that would almost never happen with most drivers.

Third, and perhaps the most important to hear by fans of this "better than average driver" idea, is that self-driving cars are not going to take off if they "only" kill almost as many people as humans do. If you want self-driving cars to be successful then you should be demanding from the carmakers to make these systems flawless.
you seem to be giving uber a big benefit of the doubt. these autonomous cars generally go slow. tempe has flat roads with great line of sight and clear weather. coefficient of friction? highly doubt it. the sensors should be looking more than just straight a head
"recently" is a pretty big caveat to throw in there. Historically Uber hasn't changed any of their behaviour until they've been caught doing something. Let's wait and see how they react to something like this.
> I can assure you that a human who is driving carelessly would be held criminal liable.

Do you see evidence that the car was "driving carelessly"? That's an honest question - from the reporting so far, it doesn't seem clear what the underlying cause was.

Secondly, this is demonstrably false: most pedestrian fatalities by vehicles do not result in criminal charges. If you don't believe me, look up the stats. Or talk to the countless bikers' advocacy groups that have been lodging this exact complaint for decades: drivers are not generally held criminally responsible, unless there are mitigating circumstances (the driver is drunk, the accident was a hit-and-run, etc.).

> Why do you assume an accident that was severe enough to have resulted in a persons death—the car didn’t just scrape them because they ran across the street—is not due to a reckless programming?

When a pedestrian dies, just because they died, that doesn't mean the driver is automatically responsible. It could have been the pedestrian's fault, or it could have been the driver's fault. Or it could be both. Or it could even be neither (a true accident, with no assignment of blame).

The same thing holds here. You can't assume that this is the result of "reckless programming", and to be entirely blunt, by jumping to that conclusion on the basis of literally no evidence whatsoever (and misinterpreting existing case law on vehicular accidents in the process), you're actually undermining the success of any future efforts to prevent these sorts of accidents in the future, whether or not it ultimately turns out to be the fault of someone at Uber.
We don't really have any statistics on autonomous car deaths yet. One fatality is only one data point; that's not _nearly_ enough information to come to any solid conclusion on the overall safety of the technology. (Not to mention the fact that a failure of any one particular implementation of self-driving car tech doesn't necessarily mean the other implementations are similarly unsafe.)
With excel locking, os x trashes, etc.? What good configuration guide would you suggest for a mixed Linux, OS X and Windows environment with MS Office?

This magic only solves have the problems

fruit:resource = xattr
fruit:metadata = netatalk
fruit:locking = none
fruit:encoding = private
delete veto files = yes
veto files = /.snapshot/.windows/.mac/.TemporaryItems/.DS_Store
We absolutely should extrapolate something from those statistics.

Let's assume that the chance of killing in any two intervals of of the same number of miles traveled is the same. Let's say that the threshold for self driving cars being "good enough" is the same death rate as human drivers.

If we assume Uber is good enough, then they should kill people at a rate of at most 1.25/100,000,000. The waiting time until they first kill someone should fit an exponential distribution. The probability that a death would occur in the first t miles is 1 - e^(-lambda t) where lambda is the rate of killing people, is 1.25/100,000,000. I.e. 1 - e^( -(1.25 / 100,000,000) x 4), which is 5 x 10^-8.

If Uber has only a 5 x 10^-8 probability of driving "safely enough" they should lose their license at the very least.

Edit: Oops, 4 != 4,000,000. It should be 1 - e^( -(1.25 / 100,000,000) x 4,000,000) which is about 0.049...

Still, I think we can ask for better than a 5% chance of being the same as a human driver.

(also replaced stars with 'x' because HN was making things italic)
I can guarantee you (at least one) other major tech companies have the same system in place. Companies that operate in multiple jurisdictions don’t want all of their assets compromised because of a raid in one city/state/country.

E.g. Brazil was at odds with WhatsApp over their message encryption — Brazil wanted WhatsApp to stop encrypting messages so that it would be possible to subpoena chat logs. If Brazilian police raided a hypothetical WhatsApp Brazil office, would it not be prudent for Facebook to cut off data access from that office? Especially given that the nature of technology means that once police have an employee’s laptop and can compel them to enter their password, they have access to essentially all of the company’s data worldwide.
I disagree. I would be astounded if Waymo, Tesla, and every other player in the field isn't already trying to craft 1000 new test cases about this incident. It's now the second(?) known death involving this technology. The first question their bosses will be asking them in their next meeting would be "would our cars have done this, too?"
So... GameFly?
IMO this is less a fault of websites that contain media, and more the fault of the OS that mediates what media is playing.

In other words, there should be a toggle to "default mute the web and keep spotify running".
4 Brands Doing Cool Work with Connected Tech
Huh. That’s...a good idea. The idea has to be developed further though. This has to be deployed on different domain names and with full content control on the web pages.

I guess that’s all doable with the “private server with root access” under enterprise pricing. What a great way to precisely measure cover time. You could inject arbitrary URLs into an application to see if your API has been reverse engineered.
This is the reason robocar firms will fight to keep all their data private. If it were public, researchers could show and personal injury attorneys could argue persuasively that there are some speeds that would never cause fatal collisions. Since those speeds will be slower than most passengers wish to travel, this mode of travel will be more vulnerable to lawsuits.
The last time I heard this, the first thing that came to my mind was "I sure hope Facebook isn't going into self-driving cars."

And then I learned Facebook is going into self-driving cars.

Sigh.
You would lose that bet. As another comment pointed out[1]:

> The NHTSA reports a fatality rate of 1.25 deaths per 100 million miles[2], twenty five times the [4 million miles] Uber has driven.

So they should have driven around 75 million more miles before getting their first fatality, in order to remain even with humans. Not to mention they've been driving on the clearest/sunniest roads in only a few cities.

Of course a sample size of one is not enough data, but I'd say we should err on the side of "we have a huge problem".

There should have been so many safety precautions in place that nobody should have died from this yet.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620736
Makes me wonder the likelihood of the public ever seeing that telemetry if it appears incriminating to Uber.
The thing to remember is that limiting self-driving cars is not safe either. Human-driven cars kill thousands of people every day; a policy that saved this person's life but set back self-driving car development by even (say) a month might well do more harm than good.
I don't recall. It may have been a short story rather than a book. I read it a long time ago.
Scaling those numbers is not useful and in fact reduces usefulness.

Comically, that’s why OP said not to do that.

Comparing dissimilar things is actually worse than not comparing at all since it will increase the likelihood of some decision resulting from the false comparison.
You’re right that there are already ways in which non-self-driving cars can malfunction. But previously we held human drivers responsible for certain kinds of accidents. For these same kinds of accidents we now propose holding no one responsible. That seems to be the dramatic change to me.

We have held humans responsible because assuming a correctly functioning car they are performing the most complex and risky task, and are most able to cause problems. Likewise self-driving car software performs a complex and risky task in which failure can have serious consequences.
> that software engineers should be held responsible for something that (as far as we can tell so far) was an accident and not the result of negligence or malice

Nobody said that. The original comment said developers should be held "accountable for a crime that if committed directly by a person would almost certainly result in jail time" [1].

The standards from medical devices and/or civil engineering, with the associated licensing requirements and verification processes, make sense. Even in the case of a careless mistake or strategic oversight, individuals who could have known but nevertheless signed off should be identified, if not explicitly punished.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jonathanyc
A large cash stash signals a failure to identify worthwhile business opportunities. For other companies it'd be an ominous sign. For this one? Maybe it's like the OP's observation that a PE of 18 is now considered low.
In a typical crash, you don't jump straight to "this was murder/manslaughter"/"who is going to jail". At a bare minimum, you have to establish fault. I don't see why this case would be any different.
Are you arguing that a machine does not have better reaction times than a human being? Are you arguing that a machine can fall asleep, drink and drive, panic in a high stress situation?

Aren't you the same person who called for holding the developer liable for writing software with a bug? Are you accusing the developer of promising something that is impossible (not hitting a pedestrian in a crosswalk?) or simply implementing it wrong?

It's worth pointing out that we have no idea yet who is at fault in this accident. It could easily be someone who simply walked out in front of traffic when they weren't paying attention.