skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's something I never see talked about in all of these discussions around social media. There is the old refrain "If you didn't pay for it, you aren't the customer, you're the product." But I don't see people talking about that mantra as a useful tool.

We all rushed to use Facebook. We put our data on their servers, we uploaded our photos and watched them get resized, stored, and served. We use a service that costs actual money to run and paid them zero dollars.

Sure, they served ads, but we've all learned to completely tune those out when it comes to being persuaded to actually buy stuff, so that revenue stream isn't enough to keep the lights on.

That doesn't leave Facebook and similar companies with too many other options. I'm not saying they are innocent, but it seems to me that much of this behavior — data mining users, selling ads to the rich to enable them to influence elections, etc. — is a predictable outcome from incentives we put in place by our collective behavior.

If Facebook didn't do this shady stuff, they'd run out of money and get replaced by another company that did. In the cutthroat natural selection environment of the market, only businesses that make money — by any means possible — survive.

I'm sure I'm naïve and missing something, but it makes me sad that the obvious solution hasn't manifested — pay for stuff. A version of Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc. that had a monthly subscription fee would have less incentive to extract value from user data because they are already extracting money directly from their users. I miss the days when Reddit just had Reddit gold.

I suppose the answer to my supposition is that companies would do both. If you have the data, why not also pimp it out even if your users are already paying you. And, at that point, the goal becomes maximum users, which is gated by subscription costs, so those fees get driven to zero and here we are.

But I do wish a simpler business model where people pay for things they use could be successful and properly incentivize companies to act in our interests. Given that in a capitalist market, businesses fully expand all the way up to the boundary of the letter of the law (and often past that), I suppose there's little left to do but try to get strong regulations passed and vigorously enforced.

Given the fundmental network effects of social media, competition — the primary user-beneficient force in capitalism — is completely ineffective. Absent that, I think all we're left with is the law.
Actually, it remembers it only if you select Chrome instead of Safari. But you know, probably a "bug".
IIRC in that case the driver T-boned a truck crossing the road, because the side of the truck was so shiny that it read as the horizon to the car's sensors.
+1 for .NET. This'll be a killer thing for us!
> may as well declare the AI guilty now right?

AI (short of AGI) is never guilty; it's creators and operators, OTOH...
I have seen no evidence that any autonomous vehicle currently deployed can react faster than an alert and aware human. The commentariat tends to imagine that they can, and it's certainly plausible that they may eventually be. But I've never seen anyone official claim it, and the cars certainly don't drive as though they can quickly understand and respond to situations.
It's not intelligent but it's also not programmed by humans in the sense that someone painstakingly put explicit logic for the possible cases.
I decided to quit my full-time job in Feb and go 100% start-up.

Two of the largest risks I considered before taking the plunge was career risk, and financial risk.

For financial risk, I’m from Waterloo Canada, which is a relatively low-cost area. I’m doing some part-time contracting to pay off the bills just to break even. I am okay to lose out on the opportunity cost of earning more money at a full-time job. I treat that as an investment in the future cash flows of the company I’m trying to build.

For career risk, I think working on a start-up can actually make you more employable and increases your future earning potential. At a start-up, you work like hell and are constantly learning. If you believe your salary should be an accurate reflection of the market value of your skills, and you work to improve those skills, then your market value should increase accordingly.

Reading Nassim Taleb’s book “Antifragile”, gave me a lot of confidence. One of the central ideas from the book is to put yourself into environments where there is an asymmetrical bias for positive payoffs. I.e. you can’t get randomly unlucky and die from entrepreneurship, but you can get randomly lucky and do very good.

For those of you curious, my company is https://www.hodlbot.io After I realized I was spending too much time rebalancing my portfolio, I made a trading bot.

For the MVP, it uses trade-only API keys to diversify your portfolio into the top 20 cryptos by market cap on Binance. It rebalances monthly.
We do not yet know whether another autonomous vehicle or human for would have done better in this situation. THAT SAID, asshole company fields asshole autonomous driver. Did we expect differently? Uber cuts every corner.
"A new study on the personal values of Trump supporters suggests they have little interest in altruism but do seek power over others, are motivated by wealth, and prefer conformity."

http://www.psypost.org/2018/03/study-trump-voters-desire-pow...
FDA Cracking Down on Site That Lets You Take a Vision Test from Home
This comment is in spectacularly poor taste given the subject of this news story.
Rylo’s shoot first, frame later camera is ideal for casual adventure-seekers
The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald (1951) [pdf]
You can create these things called websites, and use the incredible telephone or messaging apps like Signal (or even, gasp, meet in person).
Shiny and Exciting vs. Dull and Boring
This was inevitable. Some of the developers for self-driving vehicles are immensely careful, some are not. And the regulatory oversight is currently not sufficient to allow the one to operate but not the other.
What evidence do you cite that they are arbitrarily chosen?
“This Tormented Business”: The Early UK PC Market
I deleted Facebook 5 years ago. In earlier days technology used to increase productivity but now technology reduces productivity, Facebook is one of the productivity killer.
I suspect they mean the trolley car problem: "you are either going to crash into a group of school kids, or into a group of nuns. Who do you kill?"

I.e. did the uber car kill this 1 pedestrian, because it avoided killing 2 other people? Did the uber car opt for the "least killing" in this siutation?

I think this whole trolley car question - while a nice philosophical question - is silly though. I dont think humans would do any better in an emergency situation. In that split second when you suddenly find yourself in the "oh sh-<IMPACT>" situation, do you have time to a) make a deliberate, reasoned & fully-informed decision, and then b) control the vehicle effectively to follow through on that decision? I doubt it. If you had a second or two to think it through and then deliberately make a choice and steer towards that crowd of nuns, you'd probably be able to entirely avoid the accident anyway.

More likely is you'd probably do what I am sure most people do which is gasp, stamp on the brakes, shut their eyes and hope for the best ... assuming you even had time to realise there was about to be a crash before it happened. Some people might swerve, but I suspect they do that instinctively to avoid something in their way, not as a decision to hit something else.

I just dont think self-driving cars will get themselves into situations where they have to chose who to kill in the first place. And even if they did get into those situations, I really, really doubt it would be due their actions, and I'd certainly trust it to avoid the crash in the first place a whole lot more than the average human driver in the same scenario.

Some could argue "Ah but yes computers are so fast that they CAN make that informed decision about who to kill in milliseconds! So they have to make a choice! The question stands!". I'd argue back that in those milliseconds before the crash was inevitable, they'd act to prevent the accident before a human would even know what the hell was going on anyway. After that it just starts getting into a game of who can conjure up the most ludicrous hypothetical situation that rarely - if ever - happens in real life.
Agreed; more generally, there's a movement to avoid calling these incidents "crashes" instead of "accidents", since it's arguable that crashes are avoidable: https://www.crashnotaccident.com/
Irrespective of the ethics, the plan "worked" in that they managed to pressure local governments to change rules or otherwise let Uber operate
> This tedious trope jumped the shark years ago. Somehow you managed to combine it with a neo-Godwin. That's an Olympian manoeuvre!

Well, good point. It was pretty provocative.

> All: if you can't think of something stupid or bad you said as a teenager, dig deeper.

But I am not the CEO of a company that has all the intimate details of hundreds of millions of users private life. Those in power can handle a bit criticism, it's different than saying it about a random person on the street. Also 26 is not quite a teenager. While people report wild personality changes after that age, it usually doesn't happen.

> There's much to say by way of critiquing Facebook, but obviously the "dumb fucks" bit is not it.

It goes with the paragraph above on how people volunteer the information and even the designer of the service things is pretty ridiculous.

> and the discussions it spawns are predictable, therefore uninteresting, therefore off topic for Hacker News.

Hmm, fair point. Agree with flagging.
Given these cars have been blowing red lights, the human drivers aren't doing their jobs and overriding the car.
Getting rid of H1-B wouldn't end immigration though.
Assuming interoperability to be a good thing, then, coding something like a c# translation of this is a stimulating and useful intellectual exercise relative to like reading a book or solving a prescribed math problem. Assuming coding problems aren't like fossil fuel for jobs or something, and society hasn't yet reached the state where we can just neglect technology and say 'good enough,' given that (at least according to people I see while locomoting around town), there are still diseases, disabilities (physical and psychological), aging, puns, death, overpopulation, homelessness, variety of experience (I don't know what the correct word for this is, but something like 'non-crunchy-multitude-of-choice'), etc. all which may have solutions with sufficiently advanced technology (with the caveat that it may be like a pandora's box).
(You could probably superficially post-justify a solution to these kind of problems in society by strapping an RC radio to everyones head and saying 'karma', but I would guess you can't do that without the being enacting this breaking large parts of the social contract, and essentially ridding life of substance, e.g. 'this thing happened to you because you ate a fish when you were a child, and that fish had a family, and so, relatively, your brain is like a fish-size (lets say chicken because birds are actually pretty smart in the animal hierarchy) to this AI we've constructed, and thus it's eating you, and so therefore, its karmically balanced (that's not really a solution is it, I mean it is, but it's like a military tit for tat solution (even if done subtly) rather than a diplomatic / medical type solution, which would provide more leeway for things like basic fight-or-flight response of humans / miscommunication / speed of actual human thought / etc., which doesn't really fit in the tit-for-tat model)' ). Wow I wrote freaking thesis here (and I didn't really put that long of thought into it, so judge as such, like git commit 1 of an more revised thought).
I've no insight to PayPal. But MS Live aka Passport aka Microsoft Account has a 16 char, limited character set limitation. I spoke with people that worked on the system. Basically, sometime a long time ago, someone made some code that checked this. And over the years, many other parts of the pipeline ended up coding it and depending upon the same restriction. They're aware of it, but it's not a worthwhile time investment versus other work. People don't get hacked because of the limit, they get hacked via phishing, reuse, etc. Spending time testing, debugging, fixing old code across disparate systems with possibly different owners is a big cost. There's higher priority work to be done, even within security.
Correct me if I am wrong.

As you note, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is used to choose the "best fit" CDFs. The set of CDFs then used to generate a random vector, which after a covariance adjustment becomes a synthetic datapoint.

The step that can ruin the synthetic data is exactly (the "best fit" CDFs) as the original distribution does not necessarily fit well any of the well-known distribution.

At the same time, "best fit" CDFs are responsible for anonymizing the results. So if you overfit and stick to the original data too close, you lose anonymity and capture the original data bias. But if you approximate with a distribution you introduce a distribution bias.

So the solution provides a tradeoff between anonymity and "best fit" corruption of the data.
Mozilla has partnered with Magic Leap
This has little to nothing to do with the specific company (although is a convenient deflection ATM). The very idea that pre-programmed computers can deal with driving is the fundamental problem. In time, people will realize that, but at the moment the "solution" is to "patch" and make more laws to hide the truth: AI has nothing to do with intelligence.

Ultimately they will blame humans, humans are the bugs in their code.
Version 1.0 was a very very simple hosted headless image running on a few VM's. At that point there wasn't any debugger or notifications about your sessions. Pretty much just a submission form that provisioned machines to support the account.

This actually took place after a few months in a beta where I was doing everything manually (to see if it could even work). That was actually a good lesson: do things manually until it doesn't scale as it's possible that you'll be writing code that doesn't ever run!
He's saying the definition of the word being used is currently changing.

When racist people start talking about illegal immigrants and they refer to all people of a specific race or nationality, they effectively change the definition of the word.
EDIT: Yeah this was a bit reactionary on my part. I get it, it's not over the $150.

It tells a lot about Uber that they weren't willing to fork over $150 for a permit.
Earlier discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16619917
I wonder how companies handle these situations? Most places have clear requirements eg stop, check if anyone is injured, contact police, remove debris from road if safe to do so. These things aren’t so easy without a driver.
Not to be insensitive to the death. But, that bike lane design is just horrible. Are human drivers really known for respecting the "do not cross solid white line" rules? 9/10 drivers that realize at the last moment they need to turn right are going to quickly cross over this bike lane probably without much time to check their blind spot. If I was cycling on this path, I'd want to use the sidewalk and be extra cautious of peds, I don't trust drivers human or not.
I also enjoy sites that prevent pasting into password fields. Makes using a password manager a pita.
to be fair moba is pretty universal/vague too.
Marijuana's Secondhand Smoke Poses Risks to Heart and Lungs
Ah! That's a great idea. I had not considered that..
Thanks for the information, is that NPR's on the media?
btw Kurdistan Province in Iran is not a disputed area, it is officially part of iranian constitution that we have a province called Kurdistan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provinces_of_Iran) so in facebook you could choose any of the provinces of Iran, except Kurdistan.
Just wanna say that's pretty inspirational. Keep it up.
Evidence that corroborates Biblical accounts suggests that those accounts have some basis in fact. Such evidence is orthogonal to the question of whether or not any deities exist.
You can preview bit.ly links by appending a + to it.
> Human beings simply cannot switch between "not focussed" and "in charge of a car

This is not how many people drive in non-autonomous cars? Commuting is on auto-pilot for many of us; you don't really remember how you got to work and I see people tying their shoelaces, calling, eating sandwiches, reading the paper, chatting on whatsapp all the time. Sure it's all illegal (in a lot of countries), but people are bored and drove that road 1000x.
Startup founders throughout the Midwest are doing something new: staying
The best we have are case studies of non-diverse teams reliably making products that aren't very good for people who look different, despite being highly educated and crossfunctional. The very common example is the Google Photos image search labelling dark-skinned people as gorillas (and more broadly facial recognition and machine learning biases towards light skinned people in a variety of ways). But there are others I've seen.

It comes down to needing an advocate. Unless you have someone who advocates for making your products inclusive, you won't end up with inclusive products, and the best advocate is almost always an engineer who says "hey team this product doesn't work for me". (Edit: I should add, this is true for pretty much any feature, not just inclusive ones, but its also true for them)

There's no reason a machine learning team needs physics PhDs. There is a reason that same machine learning team needs dark skinned machine learning PhDs.

>It is also common with people who are more focused about hiring the most qualified people rather than being politically correct or fulfilling quotas.

Right, and given that most people don't want to explicitly state that they're bigoted, often people who are racist and xenophobic claim to hold their views because they care about hiring the most qualified people rather than being politically correct. Perhaps you aren't, but its a worryingly common tactic.
Concioussness requires a body. This is how it is, here.
One would hope that plaintext passwords aren't fed through a long pipeline of legacy systems. As soon as it's hashed, which is the first thing you should do, length is no longer an issue.
Scrapping H1-B doesn't end legal immigration.

Saying that you want to end immigration to the US, period, is anti-immigrant.

Saying that you want to end H1-B because you think these jobs should go to American citizens is not anti-immigrant.
I want preview (the app) on all my devices. Not just my laptop. Is there something out there for Windows that fill that niche?

Edit: The thing that has impressed me about preview is that I can use it for very basic image editing, filling out forms (with signatures), and reading books. And it is very good at all of those. So that is what I would want in a replacement.
I never liked the reciprocal friend model of Facebook, and I liked even less that it was exposed publicly by default, allowing anyone to crawl the social graph. Even if you lock down your friend list, it doesn't matter because your friends mostly aren't locking down theirs.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal clearly demonstrates why this is a dangerous thing. The clear solution is to unfriend everybody then delete (not suspend, but delete) your account.

Enough people do this, and Facebook's cherished network effect will be weakened enough for better alternatives to begin appearing. Alternatives that don't vomit large amounts of data about you into the public sphere by default.
But if you are already suspicious enough that you want to do that, you were never going to click on the original URL anyway, so it's no worse than not using bit.ly.
Nothing I love more than HackerNews armchair engineering.

It's not that simple, you're assuming the car even had some indication that something was wrong. For all we know the car's vision was showing high confidence it saw an open road.
Their San Francisco testing program didn't even have a license to test because they didn't want to pay for a permit.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/27/14698902/uber-self-drivin...

Nothing to revoke if they never had a license to begin with!
Look, I'm all for taking self-driving cars seriously. I've written about how they're effectively WMDs if the software update computer gets owned. I've also frequently commented about the unethical practices that Uber has taken in the past.

That being said, let's not over-react. This is a single death. These are going to happen. Right now self-driving cars are essentially teenagers learning how to drive. En mass there is going to be a death here or there, but, also en mass, we're going to have a permanently safer road once they've learned, if we can secure them from cyber attack.

Try to avoid all-or-nothing thinking here. Definitely advocate for regulations, and maybe Uber wasn't safe enough, but people are either going to die from self-driving cars or they're going to die from self-driving cars taking too long because of public outrage.
Show HN: UsedTesla.io – Marketplace for used Teslas
I think the point here is a firearm in particular is designed to project deadly force and should be treated as such. If someone "accidentally" shoots someone, it means they were negligent in their treatment of the instrument in their hand.

Autonomous vehicles are expected to be able to safely navigate a large variety of streets and highways, and possibly trails and countryside in the future, without killing anybody else around or killing the people inside, nor destroying the fixtures and buildings that make up your typical city street. The only problem is cars are inherently deadly, go look up the number of people that have died in automobile "accidents" since the automobile was invented, total it up for just one country. They need to be treated with and afforded the same respect as any other instrument intended to project deadly force, because they do, as do whatever algorithms are controlling the instrument.
You can't, but you can change your default browser in many apps (such as Gmail).
The only real diversity they're looking for is diversity of wages (trending down).

If they wanted thought diversity, this is already a very diverse nation in every sense and a foreign passport is not a requirement.

These exploitative capitalists are destroying the country. There are young black children born here that need a good paying job too. Taxes need to go up on the same employers so their schools are good enough to get all the kids there.

We should reserve the benefits of having a company in the USA for those that want to invest and benefit from our labor.

Those companies who only exist to take the good and not pay in should be forced to move their operation to Vietnam or wherever they feel is what they're looking for.

I'm not going to be held hostage by them and want them and their downward, corrosive effect out of my country.

'Free traitors' beware, people are waking up from all political backgrounds.
That bike lane is just a shoulder with bicycle symbols painted in it and it looks terrifying.
If that's something the software can't handle well then it's going to be a huge problem in many parts of the world. In many places in Europe, Africa and Asia for instance pedestrians will cross anywhere and everywhere at any time.
Calls to wait for facts never stopped the internet outrage machine in the early moments of news release. I doubt it will do much here, sadly. But it's worth pushing back against, even if it won't work IMO.

People will always relish in their biases being confirmed... even after a rare one-off event with a sample size of 1 in a burgeoning industry.