skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The arrogance of Facebook's response to this breach, quibbling over what to call it and now this, is mind-blowing. Their "it wasn't a robbery because we left the front door open" excuse may finally bring about trans-Atlantic regulation of social media.
Agreed that it's too early to really say one way or another. In maybe 100k miles of urban driving I've had one cyclist run into my car and a girl on her phone walk directly into the corner of the front, I was at a complete stop watching them both times.

Until there's a detailed report it's really hard to say if it was preventable or not - but I think regardless the optics are bad and this is going to chill a lot of people's feelings on self driving whether or not that is an emotion backed by data.
How on earth is a lawsuit a market force?

Did you even read the first 5 words?

>It'll likely never get passed

Can you stop trolling my posts? You aren't adding much of anything.
On macOS I use https://github.com/EugeneDae/Force-Paste to get around this. It uses virtual keyboard to type in the text from your clipboard. Also helpful for using the password in programs that don't allow paste.
Only if you aggregate them across companies and ignore the fact that the distribution those miles are not comparable to to distribution of human driven miles.
Friendly reminder DirectX is a proprietary windows-specific API, with its associated lock-in.
Don't fall for such simple trap.
It just sounds weird and fake in a corporate setting. Sort of like "Grandma's Homemade Cookies, by NestléKraftUnilever"
CSS: The bad bits and how to avoid them
It's less negativity and more caution. People have been burned by early adoption of breathlessly-advertised tech before.

People claim that their products can solve all sorts of interesting problems every day, and it's easy to get excited. But if they cannot demonstrate that their product actually can do what they say it does, then people are going to get suspicious.

Combine the lack of transparency with the long lead times that consumer hardware devices tend to have, and people will start wondering why nobody has been allowed to interact with a live demo of the product when it's supposed to be available to anyone within 9 months.

Everyone wants a product like this to work, but we're also worried about getting taken in by little more than slick marketing; that's how you get companies like Theranos.
Will it help me find my keys?
I can't imagine how bad it looks for Non Autonomous cars considering the 100's of pedestrians that are killed everyday in the USA.
Yeah I missed that but it doesn't look good [1] (december 2016).

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/19/uber-self...
that's not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
How Twitch Learned to Make Better Predictions About Everything (2017)
I disagree that it's childish. Magic Leap hasn't been clear on what they are actually demonstrating in their demonstration videos. They started out with some really bold claims and have been gradually scaling them back into something more reasonable (and less unique). In my opinion, the skepticism is well earned.
Looks like this really depends on the state and the contract. In this case, they were both in New York and it looks like under law she might have to pay his bills after he deceased.
Wow this looks great!
Bell Aims for Urban Air Taxi by 2025
Also, probably 95 percent of the autonomous miles are under the easiest conditions, a sunny day between 9-5 because most are at the Arizona/California test centers.
The problem is that pedestrians on a sidewalk do not follow traffic rules. They don't signal turns or stopping in advance. They choose random sides of the sidewalk to walk on. They don't have mirrors to see approaching cyclists behind them.

Vehicles, on the other hand, do follow traffic rules with regards to lane usage, signaling, and checking what's behind them. Even if they don't, they're still more predictable compared to pedestrians.
This would be an interesting incentivized service for people that submit PRs to OSS projects.
2,000-year-old liquor unearthed from ancient tomb in western China
> I wrote this as a reaction to reason news

reason news?

> I think we can make better tools than this one and I believe Facebook - and other social media - were originally quite useful and have now devolved due to market pressure.

That also applies to media and you as well.

> except for Twitter and

Why? Why did you keep twitter?

> and am ready to tear it all out of my life step by step.

Good for you. But who cares? What makes you so special that we should waste our time with your nonsense?

> It's a poison.

No offense, but so is techcrunch and the media.

I've never used facebook. But what "market pressures" are causing the sudden media hysteria over facebook? I wonder.

Also, what you are doing isn't journalism. It's advocacy. It's propaganda.

I do agree that the world would be better without facebook. But it also applies to techcrunch and your article. Facebook, social media, traditional media, your article are ultimately just waste of people's time.
Bad example for two reasons. First:

Although the NTSB investigated the accident, it was unable to conclusively identify the cause of the crash. The rudder PCU from Flight 585 was severely damaged, which prevented operational testing of the PCU.[3]:47 A review of the flight crew's history determined that Flight 585's captain strictly adhered to operating procedures and had a conservative approach to flying.[3]:47 A first officer who had previously flown with Flight 585's captain reported that the captain had indicated to him while landing in turbulent weather that the captain had no problem with declaring a go-around if the landing appeared unsafe.[3]:48 The first officer was considered to be "very competent" by the captain on previous trips they had flown together.[3]:48 The weather data available to the NTSB indicated that Flight 585 might have encountered a horizontal axis wind vortex that could have caused the aircraft to roll over, but this could not be shown conclusively to have happened or to have caused the rollover.[3]:48–49

On December 8, 1992, the NTSB published a report which identified what the NTSB believed at the time to be the two most likely causes of the accident. The first possibility was that the airplane's directional control system had malfunctioned and caused the rudder to move in a manner which caused the accident. The second possibility was a weather disturbance that caused a sudden rudder movement or loss of control. The Board determined that it lacked sufficient evidence to conclude either theory as the probable cause of the accident.[2]:ix[3]:49 This was only the fourth time in the NTSB's history that it had closed an investigation and published a final aircraft accident report where the probable cause was undetermined.[4]

Second:

In 2004, following an independent investigation of the recovered PCU/dual-servo unit, a Los Angeles jury, which was not allowed to hear or consider the NTSB's conclusions about the accident, ruled that the 737's rudder was the cause of the crash, and ordered Parker Hannifin, a rudder component manufacturer, to pay US$44 million to the plaintiff families.[16] Parker Hannifin subsequently appealed the verdict, which resulted in an out-of-court settlement for an undisclosed amount.
>the fact that you're using DPDK and RDMA suggests to me that latency and performance are very important to you, and some more assessment would be required to make a good recommendation.

A company preparing to handle wire speed services for millions of Internet toasters, fridges and such.

Stuff like high frequency logging, handling millions of active TCP connections on a single endpoint, faster than realtime media recoding/recognition, wire speed object storage, distributed search and indexing.

Effectively, the engineering task is to squeeze Amazon DC into a single rack or two that can be shipped to a colo.

We are a Chinese company, so I doubt we will ever be hiring engineering cadres or external contractors at anywhere near American wages.
Imagine if we fully separated car traffic from foot traffic. Would this have happened then?
What trend in the comments is bothering you? It's a little unclear from your comment.
You interpret it as written, which is that holding developers routinely criminally liable for bugs is going to have very negative effects. One of them is that the only developers you'll get are precisely those too unwise to realize what an incredibly stupid deal that is, no matter what the pay rate is. I don't think I'd like to see all my critical software written by such "unwise developers".

I have no problem "piercing the veil" for egregious issues. I'd have no problem holding a developer liable for failing to secure a project but just continuing on rather than quit. But "Let's just hold all the engineers criminally liable all the time!" is a bad idea and it is not already done for a reason.
A more verifiable story in a similar vein would be Frank Lloyd Wright standing under an exemplar of his "dendriform" columns, developed for the Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, laughing and whacking it with a cane as it was undergoing a loading test for the building code enforcement officers.
If you're familiar with that part of ASU campus you honestly could have seen this coming. There are a few different self driving cars in Tempe (Waymo, Uber, GM...) and Uber drives by far the most aggressive. They drive on a pedestrian heavy road and drive faster than most of traffic. They accelerate rapidly when a light changes and can brake hard. There are always tons of pedestrians in the area and it isn't uncommon to almost get run offer when even crossing during the day.
True. A dichotomy cannot explain for example tax deductible donations: they're obviously self advertising at much lower cost than a real PR campaign, still they benefit someone, so we probably should use a trichotomy like "I'm doing good even if it has a sustainable cost" - "I'm doing good only if it somehow benefits me as well" - "I'm not doing good because being evil brings even more profit than the above".
This is what's going to happen. If you've ever seen a machine learning algorithm in action, this isn't surprising at all. Basically, they'll behave as expected some well known percentage of the time. But when they don't, the result will not be just a slight deviation from the normal algorithm, but a very unexpected one.

So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars, but ones that do happen will be completely unexpected and scary and shitty. You can't really get away from this without putting these cars on rails.

Moreover, the human brain won't like processing these freak accidents. People die in car crashes every damn day. But we have become really accustomed to rationalizing that: "they were struck by a drunk driver", "they were texting", "they didn't see the red light", etc. These are "normal" reasons for bad accidents and we can not only rationalize them, but also rationalize how it wouldn't happen to us: "I don't drive near colleges where young kids are likely to drive drunk", "I don't text (much) while I drive", "I pay attention".

But these algorithms will not fail like that. Each accident will be unique and weird and scary. I won't be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular road. It'll always be tragic, unpredictable and one-off.
Can this be applied to Path tracing? If so, would this be able to accelerate something like OctaneRender?

I stumbled across this a year or so ago and was amazed at how the realistic image is built up after rotating.
https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/
Bitcoin Bust Reminds Morgan Stanley of Nasdaq Crash, but Faster
In general, I like having a diverse set of options available in terms of software implementations (eg: multiple C++ compilers to choose from). It does worry me a little bit, however, that so many companies are trying to implement their own self-driving cars from scratch. If you just look at how buggy new OS releases tend to be, how many blatantly obvious bugs you run into every month, it's clear that many software development teams don't properly test their stuff. Some companies, like uber here, will act irresponsibly and fuck up, resulting in the loss of human lives.

I would guess it's inevitable that in the medium/long-term, there will only be one or two companies developing and selling self-driving tech to every car manufacturer. Small players won't have enough data, everyone will be too afraid of the risk, the amount of government regulations surrounding self-driving cars will increase. More regulations will protect people but it will also mean it's much harder to start gathering the data you need and testing your product.
No human driver will ever receive the same input twice, but we still suspend people's licenses sometimes after a single incident. Are you arguing that we need to let Uber kill a few more pedestrians so we can more accurately determine the safety of their platform vis a vis human drivers? Why can't they fabricate some tests that demonstrate their safety in a controlled environment first?
Having these massive robots on our public streets better at least result in unfettered, transparent public access to all the data informing the thing in the time surrounding the crash.

This shift towards autonomous vehicles is utterly unnecessary. They could be simply improving the safety systems of the vehicles to intervene when the driver is about to cause an accident.

Instead they're doing the opposite - expecting the human to intervene when the robot is about to cause an accident.
It depends on what question you're trying to answer with the data (however incomplete one might view it).

Is the data sufficient to say if Uber might eventually arrive at a usable self driving vehicle. Plainly no. It's not sufficient to answer this question one way or another.

Is the data sufficient to indicate if Uber is responsible enough to operate an automated test vehicle program on public roads. Maybe.

There still needs to be an investigation of cause, but if the cause is in a autopilot failure, or the testing protocols preventing a failing autopilot from harming the public, then the question is what the remedy should be.
I find what might help those that quote statistics is to self-reflect and ask the question, how would you react if your father/mother/sister/son/daughter/etc was the victim?

Would you care that statistically self-driving cars have killed less people than human drivers?
Anyone who thinks that Amazon's P/E ratio is meaningful of anything don't understand how Amazon operates. Full stop. Amazon has the choice between growth or earnings and is choosing growth into new lines of business.

Do not think of Amazon as a large corporation (even though they are). Instead think of it as a network of startups under one corporate umbrella, with a unified management philosophy. That philosophy is reflected in publicly available documents like https://www.amazon.jobs/principles.

The mature startups spin off an amazing amount of free cash. That cash is reinvested into new startups. The philosophy is that as long as Amazon has a good management structure, and is good at identifying opportunities, their startups will succeed at a higher rate than the general market. You still have to kill a lot of them, but the successes join winners like AWS and fund new ideas.

They can pivot to profitability on a dime by simply killing a lot of their internal startups. They can keep earnings at zero by simply funding new startups.

If you see Amazon's growth stop, or you see them taking profits, then they have shifted to being a different kind of company. Wake up, take notice, and re-evaluate. Until one of those two things happens, their P/E ratio will be ridiculously high and it will not matter.

The two things that I see as long-term threats for Amazon are as follows.

1. Word about how bad they are to work for becomes sufficiently widespread among prospective top employees that recruiting becomes a challenge.

2. Some of their mature businesses start to fail, but are embedded strongly enough in the organization to make getting rid of them hard.

Of those, the first seems closer to being an immediate issue. Though it is hard to believe that their reputation could become SO bad that it would really kill them. The second is likely the bigger long-term threat.
Given that this is C, how is memory management handled?
Verizon, AT&T and Comcast Ask Congress to Make Net Neutrality Repeal Stronger
The Washington Post has an updated story with the victim's name:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2018/03/1...

> Police said the vehicle was northbound on Curry Road when a woman, identified as 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, crossing from the west side of street, was struck. She died at a hospital, the department said.

No mention of her being a bicyclist. My gut instinct is to accept that the victim was indeed a pedestrian -- with the assumption that they'd have that detail cleared up by the time they have her identity ready to release to the public.
its not that clear when you international subsidiaries. companies, when it comes to taxes, can have the cake and eat it too.
A lot of the Facebook deletion advice comes down to: "I'm hypercompetent at managing my social life and am constantly invited to important events by direct contact, and barely remember what it would not be like to be that way, therefore I don't see a significant downside to immediate cessation of all FB use."
sure Silicon Valley sucks from a housing stand point, and you’d think that you can fire up an AWS instance from anywhere, and you can. However SV has one thing no place else has, a density of talent and capital unrivaled in the world. That’s why it continues to exist.

Compare it to Hollywood. Sure you can make movies anywhere, but you don’t.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-silicon-valle...
> First off, by definition like 49% of the drivers are technically better than the "average driver".

No, that’s not the definition of mean, that’s (something like) the definition of median.

In a skewed distribution (which driving skill may very well be), the mean can be very far from the middle. If a relatively small number of people are extraordinarily bad at driving, most people are above average. If a relatively small number of people are extraordinarily good at driving, most people are below average.

Why this nitpick matters: if the leading point of your thesis depends on is quantifying how many people are above average, you should really know if the average is at the 10th, 50th or 90th percentiles (or somewhere else entirely).
I tried VR, way too immersive.
>Similarly, it's possibly a burden (albeit small) on your friends who have to text you in addition to organizing for others.

I really have to agree with this: using your friends as personal assistants is not cool. Planning events can be hard work, just scheduling your own weekend can be a hassle. That said: I do wish people used something other than Facebook to plan events. It's just not gonna happen anytime soon.
Singularity Containers for HPC and Deep Learning
That rule is in place because the stack overflow crowd doesn’t want to debate it and keeping it useful for anyone else is too much work.
It’s not done because software development is an unregulated shitshow full of wildly unethical companies scrambling for the bottom. It’s not unlike early aerospace, or early medicine, or any frontier which develops rapidly before legal frameworks inevitably close in.
> If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road.

This holds iff the control input you apply is only braking. Changing the steering angle is generally far more effective for the "pedestrian darts out from hidden place onto road" situation. It's far better to sharply swerve away to ensure that there's no way the pedestrian can get into your path before your car arrive there than it is to stand on the brakes and hope for the best.

Indeed, the faster you're moving, the more you should consider swerving away over braking -- take advantage of that lethal speed to clear the pedestrian's potential paths before he can get into yours.

Yes, this intentionally violates the letter of the traffic laws (and might involve colliding into a a parked or moving automobile on the other side of the road) and also involves potentially unusual manoeuvring on a very short deadline; but it's far better to avoid a vehicle-pedestrian collision even if it's at the cost of possibly busting into the opposing lane / driving off the road / hitting a parked car. Decently experienced drivers can do this, I can do this (and have successfully avoided a collision with a pedestrian who ran out between parked cars on a dark and raining night), there's no fundamental reason that computer-controlled cars can't do this.
And their solution is: if you get the password wrong 3 times in a row you have to call them to unlock your account. I learned this the hard way, unfortunately.
> As of December 2017 Uber had driven 2 million autonomous miles[1]. Let's be generous and double that, so 4 million.

How often did the human have to take control?
Unix or windows line endings?
Why are people calling this a data breach? As I understand it, CA just scraped the data from users who authorized their app to do so. Am I missing something here?
This is great to hear. I had an HP Touchpad and loved it.
Then I'm not quite sure what's the point of them. Surely instead of using a type you're allowed to use any of its subtypes.
Yeah, it's interesting, I've had the same experience. There's not so much magic lurking beneath the surface. Things are relatively easy to track down when you do need to figure things out; otherwise, things are pretty intuitive.

And when it comes to performance, threads and queueing, not having to deal with duct-tape and gum solutions like Resque (Ruby's "One Ring" (I love it and I hate it)) makes such a big difference.
100s a day is a little off, the figure is around 11 per day. Not saying that's great, though.
Security vulnerability to get free Amazon gift cards :)
You may be more right than you know. See Kevin Philips' "Numbers Racket", May 2008 issue of Harper's Magazine, and/or other insights on the consumer price index methodology and inflation.
Well, if it keeps investors aboard. That's what a company desperately scrambling to reach a goal that seems attainable but keeps slipoing out of reach might look like. Theranos comes to mind...
If you downloaded the Bitcoin blockchain, you may have downloaded child porn
You need to accept that Facebook adds value for some people. Maybe it doesn't add value for you, but that's no justification for extrapolating your personal experience to everyone else and assuming they are making excuses.
I could obviously live without a Facebook account. My social life is just better with it than without it. Your circumstances might be different. The point is that everybody's circumstances are different so just because you don't derive value from a particular product or service doesn't mean that other people don't.
Maybe all these techniques exist because ray tracing wasn't really possible, so a lot of workarounds were found. If ray tracing becomes mainstream and researchers focus their attention more on that, perhaps some awesome new things will be developed that aren't possible in the existing paradigm.
GitLab – Announcing March 20, 2018 Critical Security Update