skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At some point, autonomous vehicles will be carrying cargo instead of passengers. When that happens, fatalities per mile driven will no longer be a valid comparison between manned and unmanned vehicles, as catastrophic accidents will have fewer people involved.
This reminds me of the story behind the iron ring and the collapse of the second narrows bridge in Vancouver, BC.

http://www2.ensc.sfu.ca/undergrad/euss/enscquire/Vol10No2/pa...
Guess you have to be a Detroit native to fully appreciate this one. The mainstream press likes to use photos of this very building to highlight Detroit's decline.

Fitting that it will now be used to symbolize its comeback. I remember this building before it's decline, I've even taken a train into this depot as a teenager.

It also shows how serious Ford is about autonomous and electric vehicles. The company is playing catch up to GM and their new CEO is catching flack from Wall Street for it.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/19/17140936/uber-self-drivin...

The brakes didn’t even start to engage. Just how fast do you think this woman moved exactly?
The article says she died from her injuries some time later. So, she didn't die instantly on impact.

I know more than average about homelessness. A high percentage of homeless people have serious health problems. If she was homeless, she may have already been in very poor health. That may have contributed to her death.

I can think of potentially other contributing factors, but I am leery of coming across like I am badmouthing homeless people. They are subjected to enough hostility and prejudice and I am usually trying to advocate on their behalf.
I created a similar idea a while back when Gmail started caching images. The main advantage is the image itself contains the log: http://cache-logger.herokuapp.com/hello-world

Code can be found here: https://github.com/kale/image-cache-logger
Well LIDAR certainly doesn't care it's dark.
As a student I was hired as a temp for a 1 day contract. When I arrived they were just setting up the open plan office. We were asked to bring laptops and given stacks of paper and a phone, and told to work though the files, calling the numbers.

It was weird to recieve little training for what seemed to be an investigator type role.

Mid way though the day a bunch of suits arrived, toured the office, and went into a meeting. Later they left and we were told to go home.

Clearly we were faking something, maybe an inflated company sale or a bid for a contract.

The wierd thing was, the stacks of paper were real classified police files, with genuine contents (we were phoning people).
Uh, a good friend of mine did that a couple of years ago when he started a new design agency. He was going for a large government contract and they insisted on an in-house meeting as part of the pre-tender process.

He had a large office space already, in preparation for growth, but only 1 employee at that stage, so he got his high school aged daughter in, as well as some of her friends to sit in the empty desks and pretend to work. A couple of the PC's at the back facing away from the meeting room weren't even plugged in, and were just screens on the desk and keyboards attached to nothing.

It worked - he got the contract, and as a result, now has REAL employees at those stations, and in fact has to look at a bigger space to expand into.
Second paragraph:

> Chief of Police Sylvia Moir told the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday that video footage taken from cameras equipped to the autonomous Volvo SUV potentially shift the blame to the victim herself, 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, rather than the vehicle.

How is that unclear?
Really?

You don’t see “Sign up for this quiz to find out your true personality” as different than “sign up to support change and spread the word about Barack Obama”?

Facebook is a cesspool, but shady onboarding tactics makes a far more dangerous cesspool.
Why was this not a thing, before even the very first self driving thing was put on the road?
Back when his agency was a one man band, a friend pointed out that one advantage of a trendy shared workspace is that nobody ever asked how many of the people they saw in 'his' corner actually worked for him.

I've also met people who've earned temp "work" in China being nothing more than white faces in the background to make the company look international to visitors
I imagine that in companies imposing the requirement that managers periodically purge the "bottom" x% of their workforce, "to be sacked" accurately describes the real purpose of many of the new roles hired for.
This reminds me of the jobs in China where you can get paid literally walk around being white. For example, being a white guy who cuts the ribbon of a factory opening and walks around shaking hands can make $1k/wk.

http://www.chinawhisper.com/the-5-weirdest-but-best-jobs-for...
It is not a zero sum game. I don't know of Denver, but Minneapolis can grow quite a bit before we will see the issues that SF & SV have.
>more importantly in a genuine democracy - it shouldn't even be possible.

My point exactly. "Democracy" on paper doesn't really matter if the elites are successfully and massively deceiving the voters.
I disagree. Pedestrian density is generally low enough that the car could generally be doing 60km/h and not hit a "worst case" pedestrian.

For example, how many people do you see walking along freeways? If a person is on a freeway then cars should be slowing down for them. It's a rare enough event that cars could be programmed to avoid all collisions with minimal impact on average speeds.

If a car is around people then it should be going at a low speed. If there are enough people around that it can't get speed up, then that car is effectively in a "shared" or "local traffic" area and should be going slowly.

I'd argue that the effect on average speeds will be similar to having low speed limits on residential streets:a slower period at journey beginning/end but the majority of the journey would be at speed on sparsely populated arterial roads.

Here's another argument: intrinsically safe programming might even increase average speeds? Why do we even need traffic lights and pedestrian crossings with autonomous vehicles? If vehicles were 100% safe, we could do away with dedicated crossings, and there would be no need for vehicles to waste time at red lights, merely slowing down on the relatively rare times when it is necessary.
EUV’s New Problem Areas
Urgh. That's such a basic leadership thing (scold in private) that it just infruiates me that someone wouldn't get that.

Hopefully your boss figured that out or was moved out of a leadership position.

It's roughly the equivalent of a developer that writes shit code with concurrency issues, basic code smells, etc...that would be drummed out in short order. For some reason, we don't hold leaders to the same standard.
Will EUV ever happen?
What bothers me is that there was no braking happening, and maybe even apparently no notification to the car that it hit something.
Being the status quo doesn't make it any less scandalous.
Arizona is in bed with Uber on this, they were enthusiastic about getting this on the road, so political cover is much needed. I read this like a joint press release by the Governor and Uber.
Concerning another dead mobile OS, I never understood why Microsoft did not try to spin off or open-source their mobile effort.

In fact, the rationale for killing it seems an example of corporate waste: it had user base in double-digits in mid-size markets like the UK and a growing base in major non-North America markets. Why not let it grow outside of America?

It was also an OS ahead of its time, at least in terms of the UI. Where else can I pin a huge preconfigured icon to the main screen to quickly activate it when I'm in a rush? Where else I don't have to scroll through the endless list of tiny icons to find what I want?
> This is a dumb saying that ignores the fact that humans are fallible beings who make mistakes.

It's not, because the basic rules of gun handling are designed in such a way that failing to obey one of them will not result in injury. They are:

* Never point a gun at anything you don't wish to destroy
* Keep your finger off the trigger until you're ready to fire
* Always assume the gun is loaded
* Know your target and what's beyond it.

> Machines exist to serve us, not the other way around. If a product doesn't take human habits and flaws into account, it's a bad product, because over a large enough sample size someone will make a mistake.

Modern firearms are absolutely designed to this criteria - it takes a willful act to discharge them. If someone "mistakenly" fires a gun and hits someone, it requires multiple failures and clearly rises to the point of negligence.
If she stepped into traffic outside a crosswalk then I'm not sure what result anyone is expecting.
well, mainly the problem is the city doesn't prepare for it. For example, not keeping up with housing demand, public transit demand etc. THEN you get the bay area ;)
The Trump election and the Brexit campaign are often named as the two most high profile successes of CA-backed campaigns. Since they both won by such small margins, one could wonder if it wasn't thst that gave them the final edge...
That is speeding and also the car was inattentive to potential hazards outside of its vision. Normal human drivers slow down when they see a wild lady on the median looking like she might dart into the road. Normal people slow down when there are kids playing with a ball on the sidewalk. Do these cars do that? Do they even drive the speed limit?

edit: Also accidentally killing someone with your car because of minor speeding or inattentiveness usually results in a misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter charge. Who is getting that charge here?
The bias there is largely do to the differences in behaviors and histories of the parties involved. It's one thing for a charity group to run a donation center, and a wholly different thing for a life-long con artist to do it.

It is a rationally induced bias.
I think he is saying that she probably would have died even if a human were driving.
I feel a bulk of it is just marketing hype. Certain things don't scale well, but they sure sound good and shine bright. Snow flakes and bad math, Let's IPO and pass it on to retail investors.

Bringing production closer to the point of consumption/end user does indeed make sense. All the inputs in an indoor growing environment definitely twist things up once you really do the math. Vertical outdoor would make more sense. As soon as you incorporate HVAC, lighting, growing media, hydro set up, rent in urban areas, cost of human labor, nutrients, water purification/recycling, genetics, dehumidification if required, pesticides, air filtration, opex, and on it goes...it becomes rather messy and impractical in the short term.
If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620402, it's unclear what it means and how you meant it. I'm sure many readers took it literally.
Yeah, I tried a quick googling for it as well, and got buried in resources about the name Noah instead.

I thought it would be more wide-spread, but there's wikipedia pages for it in Swedish, Norwegian and Iceland at least:

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noaord
I can see when the car in front of me is acting erratic or notice when the driver next to me is talking on their phone and adjust my following distance automatically. I don't think self-driving cars are at that point yet. The rules for driving a car on a road is fairly straightforward - predicting what humans will do -- that's far from trivial and we've had many generations of genetic algorithms working on that problem.
i mean the sharing of profits between business and labour. the finance world is a massive outlier in this - it's is striking. And yes calling someone with 120M bonus "labour" as if they were a blue collar steel worker is silly, but it's accurate...
This was covered over a year ago: https://danstroot.com/2017/03/19/the-man-least-likely-to-suc...
So here's one thing about this incident where humans do have a system for this already.

People are very good at reading body language. It's possible to gather someone's likely intentions (wrt moving) in a near instant. A defensive driver will see body language that could dart out into the street and slow down, just in case, and give more attention to the person. We are really good at this.

I know you can say it was dark and therefore maybe harder to see this, but a self-driving car shouldn't take its eyes off anything anyway, so that seems irrelevant. Unless it's almost pitch black, people can read this sort of information.

So what gives? Uber's self-driving system clearly lacks the full suite of decisions made by human drivers. This makes me skeptical that their cars can be significantly safer than human drivers.
What changed is that an attack vector has been found to take out Cambridge Analytica. The Democrats are in full political warfare with the Trump regime, and this is just another salvo.
Just to continue my line of unpopular opinions about this: whoever chooses to put a car on the road instead of traveling in a way that hurts others less (walking, transit, bike), is responsible at least in part for any damage, injury or death, just by being there. How many people die by wandering out in front of somebody else walking along? Nobody even has to call a cop, much less determine whose fault it was, because nothing happens.
We look at the alternative which is our co-workers, and people giving us our specs, and our marketing teams and think 'putting these people in charge of a large metal box travelling at 100kmh interacting with people just like them - that is a good idea'...

It is not that we think that software is particularly good, it is that we have a VERY dim view of humanity's ability to do better.
But this advice is kind of ridiculous in its unqualified form as you have presented it. If folks followed your advice, there wouldn't be an "io" package in the standard library. So why does it exist? Because it's damn useful to not define interfaces every single time you need them. It gets old real fast.

This is exactly what the GP is saying.
This works as long as he doesn't get fired twice in front of the same customer.
Atlas Obscura just had a nice article on this. "Wolf" is another example.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-does-dagnabbit-me...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
> I don't think anyone assumed

Everyone who worked at Facebook or on 3rd party integrations knew this for years.
No, I haven't. I doubt reusable coffee filters are "cool" enough to attract that kind of attention. I need to somehow reach the people who are already making them, and they are almost certainly in China somewhere.
>before anyone has even downloaded the recordings

The second paragraph of the article states "video footage taken from cameras equipped to the autonomous Volvo SUV potentially shift the blame to the victim herself."
Serverless: A Platform Built from Fear
Zuckerberg has done a ‘horrible’ job; Sandberg should run Facebook
Fortunately Google translate does a good job with that, thanks very much. I really love learning about new quirks of language.

I’ve read it now, and that’s so cool. It also cam with some good references I’m going to get into now. Thanks again. :)
If we're not holding autonomous drivers to a higher standard than human drivers, I'm not convinced on the long term benefit of this technology.
Your comments on this heated topic stand out as being particularly unsubstantive and flamebaity. Could you please not do that here? It isn't just that they're bad comments for HN, it's that they encourage worse.

If you'd (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart when commenting here, we'd appreciate it.
>> the surface of the patch is equal to the limit surface that would be obtained by the subdivision scheme.

That's not true if any of the vertices is extraordinary. In other words a vertex shared by more or less than 4 quads. The good news is that subdividing those quads each into 4 smaller ones will result in 3/4 of the surface area meeting the right criteria. Or the area hard to deal with becomes 1/4 the size.

The ultimate coolness of subdivision surfaces is that every vertex on a subdivided mesh is a leaner combination of the original vertices. The weights do not change during animation. The weights only change if the topology does. Another nice thing is that meshes at different LOD contain the vertices of the lower LOD mesh.

They really do everything with one exception - they can't exactly represent quadric surfaces which are so important in CAD tools.
I mean I did mean it literally as a factual legal statement, not as a normative statement on how society should work.
>speeding

>didn't engage breaks

Definitely gives me confidence in self-driving cars, at least she "may have been homeless" so I can sleep easy tonight. Thanks Uber and Tempe!
okay i haven't been following this deeply, but the person hit was a cyclist right? not a pedestrian.

if so. how does a self-driving car not identify a bicyclist? how does a bike come out from the shadows and "surprise" a self-driving car?
Supreme Court blocks redrawing of Pennsylvania congressional maps
I'm reading this on one. With Android KitKat (lineageos). It's stable and fast enough to browse and read pdf. Funky, someone actually built Android 7 ans even 8 Roms. V7 is OK but a bit slower. V8 runs but since they started on february, there were large issues with play store, the os boots and runs fine, which is amazing in itself, but most apps fail.

I still have the webos partition and booted it after trying v8 and god how Swift it was(sic). Would love to see the LG version run here too.
How do you know that this is not possible? It is not useful to make broad generalizations about the field because of a single company, especially with so little information.
There are many countries with a larger proportion of middle class and at the same time less sprawl than in USA. For example Denmark, Japan.
I don’t think that the opinion of the police is at all relevant here, since they have no tools for investigating how self-driving cars react in accidents.

The sensors and reaction time of a self-driving car are entirely different from a human, so it’s possible that a crash for which a human is not at fault could be averted by properly programmed self-driving car software.
800ms is pretty slow for a sober human I think

https://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/statistics
It's impossible to know. The simulation needs to be very good with thousands and thousands of all the weird situations that can occur in the real world. Without knowing how sofisticated the simulation is and if they also are using generative algorithms to try to break the autonomous system you can't even ballpark it.
Right—that was unclear, though, and if some readers took it as an endorsement I'm sure you can understand why they'd flag it.
NY Time article "The technique had been developed at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Center. The center declined to work with Cambridge Analytica, but Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American psychology professor at the university, was willing.

Dr. Kogan built his own app and in June 2014 began harvesting data for Cambridge Analytica."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambr...
does this have a performance benefit or are you recommending it for the code clarity?
Data science skills that translate from video games to FinTech
>Either we go out into the public roads with very high certainty that OUR software and OUR hardware won't kill someone, or we wait till we get there.

As long as it kills fewer people than would otherwise have died due to negligent human drivers I'd say it's already there.
Thanks for posting this! This is the kind of content I love to see on HN.

Wow, Visual Basic... It takes me back to my AOL proggie days!
Why wouldn't you? When you deal on the large scale (running countries) you should be utilitarian.

if excessive caution causes more death and more suffering, why would you be for that?
That’s a great statement on the issue almost always faced by security professionals. Almost impossible to impress upon people the stakes when you can do something, almost impossible to do anything once it’s too late.
The current investigation into the Russian meddling of the U.S. presidential election is still underway. It's still too soon to assume that the interference was "less than $1 million worth of ads".

For example, the Russians have been funnelling money to Trump's family for a decade. Trump sold a FL mansion for 240% of it's value ($100M) to a Russian oligarch:

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-sold-40-million-estate-russian...
The massive earlier discussion is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16619917, but since the current thread is rising we can let it have the next shift on the front page.

Edit: some people have objected that it's biased to let the discussion shift to "Police say Uber is likely not at fault" in place of the original report about the death. That's a fair point, so we've taken the downweight off the original story.

Just so it's clear: usually what we do when there's a major ongoing story is let discussion hop from an earlier submission to a later one as significant new information arises. We link to thread n-1 from thread n, so people who want to follow back can do so, but the idea is to have only one thread about the story—the latest one—on the front page at a time.

In this case, though, it's debatable whether "police say" counts as significant new information. And we don't want to be biased. So we'll restore the previous thread and err and have two on the front page for a while.
My problem is that they compile information on people whether or not they have a fb profile (the shadow profile). There is something about this (and various other privacy violating aggregators for hire) that really bother me. We should be having a discussion on a broader solution that applies to control of a persons data from all third parties, not just singling out facebook.

This is why I am on the fence between deleting the account and just poisoning the data.
I never said anything like that. Did you mean to reply to another comment?
You aren't kidding about it being standard operating procedure. Almost every time a pedestrian or cyclist is killed in New York City, the police come out and blame anyone but the driver. And then video will turn up afterwards showing that the driver was driving unsafely, and that the fatal accident could have been avoided. Still, no charges are filed. It's like they have an allergy to paperwork.

I want to see video of this fatal crash. Nothing else will suffice.
Apparently that's going to be a lot harder as the Party starts looking a lot closer at foreign work visas over the next few years.
Do you also believe that long haul trains are inherently immoral, given that they are more likely to cause bystander injuries/death than airplanes?
> According to the Chronicle, the preliminary investigation found the Uber car was driving at 38 mph in a 35 mph zone and did not attempt to brake. Herzberg is said to have abruptly walked from a center median into a lane with traffic. Police believe she may have been homeless.

I know this isn't the most pertinent issue here, but I'm surprised the self-driving AI is allowed to speed, though with further research, this seems to be the case with Google/Waymo software too:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28851996

Though in that BBC article (which is from 2014), the stated scenario is when the self-driving car is surrounded by traffic exceeding the speed limit. It doesn't sound like this was the case for the Uber vehicle.
The most probable scenario is that racism and insularity are caused by economic stagnation.
+1 for using Perl

Care to share your stack?
Isn't that linking to the results of people playing a game where they're paying attention and looking for something to react to?