skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, unfair is a matter of opinion. The concentration of moviemaking in Hollywood was a historical accident. From the point of view of present cities, there's no reason to see that as fair.

They also aren't unfair in the sense that LA can't do exactly the same thing. The theory of places like Atlanta and Vancouver is that the film industry has positive externalities, so in theory there's nothing wrong with capturing some of that value and paying the people who create it. It's a free country, after all, and if LA isn't willing to bid as high, then perhaps the market has spoken.

Personally I'm not a big fan of tax incentives, but unfair isn't a word I'd particularly use to describe them.
If he simply continued to do what he is already doing, he would pay $0 in taxes..indefinitely. Viewed that way this is clearly a penalty for changing course.
> strikes me as the existing system on steroids.

I don't understand this at all. Can you explain?

The monetary system we have today enables politicians to tax us without our consent -- they have the ability to print money.

In the past, if a government wanted a war (such as Vietnam), they'd need to find a way to pay for it (usually taxes). Unpopular policy was frequently met with protests because the policy was explicit. Now they can just tax us via inflation. We all know inflation is there, but we don't realize what it's doing to our savings and wages (especially because no one can agree on how to measure inflation).

In 2008, the government was able to bail out financial institutions and prop up an unjust housing market by printing enormous sums of money. Had they not had the ability to print, politicians would have needed to seek the public's consent to accomplish their policy proposals.
I hope we see the day when every car crash makes national news and there’s a big NTSB investigation into what happened.
That move is against the law, at least in San Francisco. The vehicle should enter the bike lane to turn right.
> He has been overseeing the transfer of his security team to Facebook’s product and infrastructure divisions. His group, which once had 120 people, now has three, the current and former employees said.

So with Stamos's departure/resignation, Facebook will have also reorganized its structure to not have a dedicated security team? Or at least one at the same level in the hierarchy as product and infrastructure?
I personally think the news on this is rather "noisy" right now (we'll see what emerges later). But from what I see of the Channel 4 expose (https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...), this story potentially involves far more than the United States election... and may actually involve flat out illegal activity.

Either way, I agree with you that the election of Donald Trump was more than just "the Russians". However, just because some of the elements were home-grown doesn't IMHO mean that we dismiss the degeneration of social media that has come about of late. Both from Facebook (and others, but they are the big offender)'s tendency to over-spy into your personal life (of which Cambridge Analytica is a symptom of this). And the extremely poor safeguards on API abuse on too many social media platforms (Russian and other Twitter political propaganda bots are but a symbol of the bot problem on Twitter and elsewhere in general).
Of course he did - C-level officer close to hugely controversial issue, leaving the company in 6 months. It'll be predicated on an NDA, some sort of success metrics for the transition process, and a monster golden parachute.
Do you believe human-driven tech is theoretically possible?

Current experiments and production data from human controlled vehicles have not been encouraging.
DARPA is waaay before what's called "seed" level funding in the commercial sector. They are the pre-pre-pre-seed. Taxpayers fund a lot of military procurement for nascent technologies as well.

Again you make a false comparison. Nobody claimed that early stage investors are entitled to "all economic value". The statement stands that costs are socialized. Silicon Valley is greatly subsidized by early stage taxpayer investment.

> Are you really going to make someone else go point out the hundreds of millions in dollars of seed-level funding by Google, by Uber, etc., to demonstrate the obvious point that the DARPA Grand Challenge is terrible evidence for the claim "autonomous vehicle development was funded by taxpayers".

"Autonomous vehicle development was funded by taxpayers" is a factually correct statement. You again fundamentally misunderstand the distinction of when investments are made vs. quantity of investment. Earlier stage investments are riskier; Google et al did not start pouring money in until the technology started showing some promise after many years of taxpayer investment. As is commonly the case with our high tech system.
Or maybe there is no whistle to blow.
Sierra Leone missed an opportunity here to embrace the hype and declare itself "The Crypto Jungle".
What would Microsoft have to gain? Absolutely nothing. What do consumers gain. A hell of a lot.

That's why it's foolish to assume Microsoft will change their ways somewhere down the line. The point is that it is us, the users that should be choosing alternatives and not celebrating vendor lock-in.
The same people looking and working on the CSS are the same people looking and working on the HTML. HTML full of long complex class names is a bit harder to grok.

I actually prefer nice semantic HTML but I admit that's not always possible.
That's basically what human driving is though, no? We consciously and unconsciously take our attention off the task all the time. It's not possible to drive fully alert of surroundings all the time and at least part of the time we are simply dead reckoning in fairly safe lanes of travel at constant speed and direction with minimal pedestrian and cross traffic. I could call it "controlled chaos", "luck", "planning" but there is some amount of unknown when moving a multi-thousand pound object around, and as speed increases so do the chances, ability to optimally correct, and severity of mistakes. It is very interesting and challenging to map the morality of the decisions of moving these machines onto automation.
Got LinkedIn account? I would suggest to just announce to your network that you are available for remote contract work, additionally directly ping friendly connections who have any decisive power in their companies. A network and reputation is a must if you want to earn good money while freelancing remotely.

Also better to pitch a daily or weekly rate, otherwise the hourly remote work may become micro-management nightmare.
1.15 per hundred million vehicle miles traveled by humans [1]. Uber only reached a million miles in September, with Waymo a little ahead at four million [2].

Note that this is far too little data from which to draw any conclusions, since the sample size for fatalities involving self driving cars is one and the number of miles driven is many orders of magnitude less.

[1] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/28/16709104/waymo-self-driv...
> Facebook’s chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, will leave the company after internal disagreements over how the social network should deal with its role in spreading disinformation, according to current and former employees briefed on the matter.

This opening sentence is frightening, I would rather have learned that FB executive disagree about how to deal with FB "role in NOT spreading disinformation"
fail2ban[1] can be set up to do this trivially.

[1] https://www.fail2ban.org/
I just don't have a regular HN account and I used the one I happened to have open.

I'm actually running an agency with several other people (in Sweden FWIW) and finding a supply of remote gigs @ decent rates would be a big help to the business.
I think there is likely a common need for a set of standard training models. This may hinder innovation for some time, but it's a cost we should accept when releasing a potentially dangerous technology to the public. It would have the added benefit of multiple companies contributing to a common self-driving standard which could accelerate its development.

That being said, when the first real cars were introduced to the world and later improved upon there were many more fatalities than we're likely to experience with self-driving technology.
Non-antibiotic drugs promote antibiotic resistance
Exactly, with LIDAR the logic isn't very tricky. if something in front, stop.
Yes I do this.
> The situation might change when the millenials and younger generations start becoming more politically active.

Yes, the self-serving regulatory system that was repeatedly taken advantage of to benefit a small group of property owners in previous generations will be solved by the next generation who will inherit or earn properties of their own... /s

When power repeatedly corrupts those whose define the rules then maybe the solution is stop stop giving them power? Or at a minimum limit their power...instead of handing it to the next guy with no changes and expecting different results.
Most of what you say is speculative. Without their code we will never be certain for sure.

Also: "Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… " -Theodore Roosevelt
If human behavior on the street changes because of the fear of autonomous cars, life on the streets and the streets themselves will be much shittier.

I can see banning autonomous vehicles in city centers.
We’ll have to agree to disagree. The available facts say that she was jaywalking. You want to argue with that, apparently just to argue. So that’s OK, enjoy your argument.
Good to know! But I am more curious for the data cover every self-driving vehicles, not just about Uber. It could be Uber is doing worse, but my ask is whether we (as an industry) is still on a right direction for this "bold bet".
Owned by facebook...
The only question is "How much" and that question would be answered in quarterly filings.
Wondering what he thought would be him doing "a better job weighing in"? It seems like his deleted tweets were apparently too honest? i.e. in arguing that there was no data breach, he argued that FB's API and TOS allowed (without oversight) for all app developers to do the kind of data harvesting Cambridge Analytics did? That was well-known by developers, but I guess it's different stating it as an official policy.
Second quantization and c++ (looking for beta testers and developers)
I'm pretty happy to accept that, theoretically, any form of energy could be substituted for any other form. So sure, you can swap electricity in for oil.

That doesn't change the present state though, which is that oil is linked to pretty much everything.

And it really doesn't say anything about the economics of the situation. Batteries can store energy for use on demand, but nowhere near as well as fossil fuels. In the short term, I think the difference is something more than an order of magnitude (~1Mj/kg batteries vs >40MJ/kg fossil fuels; I don't feel like looking up per volume numbers but I imagine I'd see the same gap thing).
More than that - if something approaching from the side at intercept velocity, slow to avoid collision.
FWIW, PayPass and PayWave are the trademarked terms used by MasterCard and Visa internationally (respectively) for contactless payment
That's reasonable while the system is in testing and in small scale use. If it ever becomes a major part of the transportation system, it won't be desirable to shut it all down every time there's an accident.
Stamos sure knows how to pick stinker companies.
CA sound like a bunch of scumbags and I'm glad people are shining light on these kinds of activities. However, I'm not convinced what they did was really all that new or interesting. This is our modern world and it's terrifying. Call it marketing, propaganda, fake news or disinformation, we're being manipulated constantly by numerous unattributable actors.

The more interesting question to me is why is CA being called out for it? I'm sure there are numerous groups doing this now both privately and funded directly by states. That doesn't make it right, but it changes the question to; What's special about CA?

I've been reading a biography of Allen Dulles called the Devil's Chessboard. Dulles founded the CIA and setup the agency as a prime purveyor of disinformation campaigns. These kinds of Machiavellian tactics likely go back further than The Prince himself. The only thing new here is the level of amplification modern data technology provides, but this is not limited to CA.
Ethical rules for automated and connected vehicular traffic (pdf) [2017]
The injustice!.
Just to share some thoughts, I'm a Portuguese expat in Germany that is also moving back as company owner.

I got tired of the high taxes charged to small companies around here. Last year alone we got royally charged over 65% of the income for no good reason in DE. With a stable customer base, it has been good (less taxes, less hassle) to work from PT.

My tip is that you also look on other cities besides Lisbon.

On our case we moved into Coimbra. It is directly on the middle way between Porto and Lisbon, between 2~3 hours away from both airports using public transportation (trains/bus have Wifi). Airplanes tickets are costing ~30 GBP for a back and forth trip between PT and Frankfurt through RyanAir.

Housing prices in Coimbra are amazing, I'm renting a full house with 5 bedrooms for ~240 GBP/month. This is an academic city similar to Edinburgh, about 2000 years old with roman buildings still around. All that to say that we get the good stuff without that metropolis pricing of a big city.

Just don't drive a car around here, I have the impression that turning blinkers are not default equipment on these cars.
In my view, it should not become a major part of the transportation system until we are confident that it's actually safer.
I can easily see how FB wants to throw CA under the bus and make it look like data theft while the truth FB wants to draw attention away from is that this is the system working as intended.

Or if not technically "intended" then well within the boundaries of what FB is willing to tolerate as long as it's making them money.
The local startups around here try to self fund so the focus is on making a profit. The types of companies like twitter that can lose money while growing the base for years changes the types of products each will/can make.
I added an edit to my comment: We don't have a computational/theoretical model for human consciousness. This is why it's called The Hard Problem of Consciousness.
> failed institutions to literally be seized, and an orderly re-distribution of assets processed.

You realise that a large chunk of the assets were bank deposits of ordinary people and businesses, and that it was judged that having none of the payments infrastructure working for months would be a far worse outcome? It was absolutely critical to keep the system functioning. Arguably more should have been nationalised in the manner of RBS, though. And more should have gone to jail for robosigning.
We also don't know how many fatal crashes were avoided due to human intervention (Uber has people inside the cars). It is almost certainly a whole lot worse than 30x at this stage.
several conventional luxury cars already have this feature - they detect crashes and call emergency services.
> It's basically just a new type of search result ad...

It makes me wonder how many of their other "verticals" will soon be, or already are, basically just a new type of ad. Flights? Restaurants? It's important to remember that the average person probably isn't aware that these are even ads.

Ugh. It's a shame that Google wasn't satisfied with just being a $1B company that made a kick-ass search engine and sold tasteful ads next to the results. Instead, they're trying to get a taste of every part of the economy. Does anyone else remember the company that kicked Alta Vista's ass?
This is not a really strong argument against self-driving cars. The fact that a problem is NP-hard doesn't make it untractable. Every day we use apps that deal with NP problems (e.g., routing problems, packing problems, etc.). Also, note that there're P problems whose instances can be harder than (smaller) NP ones.
Between this story and the other one on the front page about the whistleblower who exposed the leak getting blacklisted, I think it's pretty clear that, of the two options

A) acknowledge the serious underlying problems and work hard to fix them

B) deny everything, retaliate against anyone who dares bring it up to create a chilling effect

Facebook is going all-in on option B.

(EDIT: And if you don't believe me, check out foeey's post about Facebook desperately trying to clear out CA's offices before the authorities can.)
That's interesting because I loved the hardware, with the keyboard being a big highlight; I liked it better than any RIM keyboard I had previously used.
Didn't he also leave yahoo for practically the same reason?
There's breaking reporting that Facebook just had personnel in the Cambridge Analytica offices before the UK authorities could get there with warrants.

https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/975844154361221121

> BREAKING: Facebook WAS inside Cambridge Analytica's office but have now "stood down" following dramatic intervention by UK Information Commissioner's Office..

https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/975855218490519552...

> To be clear, @facebook was trying to "secure evidence" ahead of the UK authorities. Nice try, @facebook. The UK Information Commissioner's Office cracking whip...British legal investigation MUST take precedence over US multibillion $ company.....

Something VERY wrong is going on at Facebook.

edit, with another account:

https://twitter.com/DamianCollins/status/975856097163702272

> Facebook have confirmed that auditors and legal counsel acting on behalf of the company were in the offices of Cambridge Analytica this evening until they were told to stand down by the Information Commissioner. These investigations need to be undertaken by the proper authorities
So it is essentially Facebook not listening to its users, and understanding the territories in which it operates? i also imagine that Facebook has a political and national agenda to follow at this point, if not also one that is supported by the MIC as well.
If it's been styled with an id then it's already specially called out in the CSS.

Either remove that, or add the id to the selector with the style.
Yeah, the police clarified that she was walking her bike across the street: https://twitter.com/AngieKoehle/status/975824484409077760
It doesn't even need to be that. Imagine the shit show that a city would be when it's entire transportation fleet is immobilized because someone has messed with their safety features.
Semiconductor job hunting trip to Santa Clara
Heya guys, I was hoping to get some advice or even some contacts for an upcoming trip I'm making.

I'm a recent PhD graduate in electrical engineering, specialising in semiconductor processing. My thesis was on nanowires, nanowire devices and material characterisation. Unfortunately, I live in New Zealand and there is very little industry in semiconductors here. I have been applying for entry level positions all over the place for nearly a year and have had very little interest back. It wouldn't be half as bad if I had a stack of rejections, but the vast majority of positions don't even respond and checking back on their career sites just says "accepting applicants" after months.

I'm not even sure if it's a remotely good idea or not, but I've taken the rather drastic step of booking a plane ticket to Santa Clara, with the intent of wandering around for two weeks and trying to talk to actual people at some of the companies headquartered there, the likes of Intel, GlobalFoundaries, Applied Materials, LAM Research etc and trying to hand off some CVs. As I said, it might be a terrible idea and I might end up wasting a whole lot of money being escorted out of buildings by security for two weeks, but I'm hoping that by making myself available to talk to, it might help me get past that first hurdle of being Johnny Foreigner.

Just wondering if there's anyone here working in the area who might have either some advice or even a contact I can ask for at any of the semiconductor companies in Santa Clara?
Gaming with Windows Machine Learning (ML)
I can't find it, but I remember reading that an aggressive driver saves on average 20 seconds on what is on average a 10 minute trip.
I don't understand why he deleted that. It seems a reasonable summary. When I originally saw his tweet about the deletion I thought he may of gone on some crazy rant.
The citation is the article itself.
Oddly, the only banks this happened to were in Cyprus and are still in business.
Definitely, the problem with leanpub is that they ask for 99$ to start a book. I thought about that before, but i don't know if i could sell enough books to recover at least that inital value..
> On the other hand, it mentions a bicycle, but also says the victim was walking, which I find odd

The police clarified that the victim was walking her bike across the street: https://twitter.com/AngieKoehle/status/975824484409077760
Is it true?

You can get depth sensing (time of flight) 2D camera Orbecc Astra for $150 or 1D laser scanner RPLIDAR for $300. Of course they are probably not suited for automotive, but for me even extra $2000 for self-driving car sensors isn't that much.
> Or at predicting a driver that's going to swerve into your lane because they spilled coffee on their lap or had a stroke.

Neither are humans, and a self-driving car can react much faster than any human ever could.
Fun fact: Warren Buffet owned a large stake in Moody's (largely responsible for fraudulent ratings). Additionally, much of Warren's wealth was built on an "insurance float". Had the stock market not recovered (only possible because of the Fed), Warren would have lost everything. Hilariously, Warren is also a large owner of Wells Fargo -- yet another corrupt institution. But shucks, Warren is just a nice guy who got lucky picking a few stocks! You can do it too! He sure wishes his secretary paid as little tax as he does!
Zuckerberg's and Sandberg's response to all these events has been the weakest and lamest that I have ever seen from any leadership, regarding controversial issues that involve a company of this size...and that's hard to beat when you have the likes of BP and Volkswagen... Do they really think that just ignoring the issue will make the problem go away?
> 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.

Do we even know yet what's happened?

It seems rather in bad taste to take someones death, not know the circumstances then wax lyrical about how it matches what you'd expect.
No one has made that statement. I pointed out that DNS by nature is cached and distributed. Not that it's impossible to manipulate, but that it in every circumstance is not worse than a TLS intercept, and in some cases less bad.

DNSSEC did make one important design decision: Signing is offline. That alone makes the threat model different than with TLS, and makes for some interesting use cases.
Which is hilarious to me because AZ is the bastion of those "Don't treat on me" stickers and all this anti-regulation sentiment...until someone gets killed by a lack of regulations and then everyone wants to lock everything down and blame the government for not doing their due diligence.
I was in Canberra for a week late last year and I never used cash, everywhere took debit cards. Some had a surcharge for using debit over eftpos but I didn't see any shops or restaurants that were cash only. Market stalls were, unlike in NZ where mobile EFTPOS is almost everywhere.