skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is political weaponization of data and information for the purpose of putting an individual in power. It's not me trying to sell you a pug plushie or get you to use my accounting software.

It's deliberately lying to seed fear, distrust, division, and hate between citizens. It's deliberate manipulation to create distrust of government institutions. It's the destruction of civil society and civil discourse for the purpose of winning an election.

This should not be tolerated of anyone, particularly of our own head of state.
I love how everyone is throwing fuel on the fire here with no actual details as to what happened in the accident. It could simply be she ran out into oncoming traffic and got hit. Hard to say a human driver could have performed any better. The devil is in the details.
Bad idea. Even Uber corporate VPs shouldn't be exposed to unnecessary injury risk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_47utWAoupo
Interesting question here: did Uber have authorization to operate automated in AZ? If not, and they had a human operator behind the wheel as a backup, is that human liable for manslaughter charges for not being in control of the vehicle?
Word Translation Without Parallel Data
The good old:
Oh look, there are n different services, but all of them have not completely nailed it and my specific use case is not covered.

I'll create a new service that does all of the stuff the old services already did, aswell as this new thing, thus making the old n services obsolete. Everyone will be thankful for the unifying service and hail me for reducing the number of choices from n down to 1.

That's how we ended up with n+1 different services.
The FLOSS side has argued for openness in critical systems for ages. Medical devices such as pacemakers, air plane systems, automatic breaks on cars, voting machines, and the list just goes on. If the device get hacked or has any bugs then people will likely die (except for the voting machine), but the code is kept private even for those running in devices which literally gets operated into your chest and which a person has to trust with their own life. Governments all over the world seems to be very much against the idea to require that such critical code is made openly for the sake of safety, as that would leak the oh so important trade secrets.
Beware of Blockchain stories with unsubstantiated facts. The original story had many red flags, not the least of which being the use of the future tense in a quote by Gammar.

“Anonymized votes/ballots are being recorded on Agora’s blockchain, which will be publicly available for any interested party to review, count and validate,” said Gammar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16598210

The space is littered with claims like this that turn out to be nonsense. Don't trust, verify.
Largely because of Ralph Nader.

It's amazing how reformers get demonized even after their platform is accepted wholesale by the rest of the world.
I get dizzy about half an hour into using the HoloLens. I am not sure why, I think it may be because the tracking/rendering doesn't quite keep up with fast head motions making the holograms "inconsistent" with the real world. It might also be that it's because of the accomodation/convergence mismatch ...
I spent the past few years working for a cancer research startup (which unfortunately tanked), and the oncologists that I worked with were all skeptical about "anti-aging" research - apparently the thing that ages our cells is the same thing that slows down the spread of cancerous cells. Everything is pointing towards a choice between letting our cells age and dying relatively painlessly o fold age or halting aging and speeding up (a more painful death by) cancer.
What motivates minorities to move to the Midwest if it seems the culture doesn't seem to support racial integration?

In my case it was simply that the only Minnesotans I had ever known (and one turned out to be Canadian!) were very nice people. Yes, I moved half-way across the continent based on a dataset of N=2!

But further, your comment presupposes that "the culture doesn't seem to support racial integration" when (1) this assumption isn't based on anything beyond speculation and (2) it was honestly something that hadn't even occurred to me.

Stated plainly: as a minority, my experience has been that people who "advertise toward immigrants or minorities" typically have an agenda that I won't necessarily agree with and doesn't help me in any way. I don't need "support," although I welcome it; I need people to stay the fuck out of my way.
Probably mine being very recent and ads free changes the experience.
> Simply counting traffic fatalities suggests that crazy pedestrians causing unavoidable accidents cannot be common

Of course not. I'm not saying they're common, merely that they exist. I do not agree with the idea that accidents would go away if drivers were just trying harder, though. There are legitimate unavoidable accidents, and there are also limits to practical human driving.

> Also: although I personally don't object to some rational victim blaming I think it's a little distasteful that we're already speculating about how this must be the victims's fault

To be really clear, I am not blaming the victim here. I have no idea what happened. I'm actually very inclined to blame Uber, though I recognize that's just my personal bias against them.
Personally, I'm waiting on the indictments of the US citizens, including high-level federal employees/politicians that have done the much same thing for decades in other countries.
Dynamic word embeddings for evolving semantic discovery
Your new hosts file
https://pastebin.com/d04ah8eP
Yep. There's a billion and a half reasons you wouldn't use full-blown path tracing for games. It'll always perform worse regardless of what you do, the frame budgeting is likely going to be a total nightmare, the tree search you need to trace rays requires too much branching to map well to GPUs (it's perfectly possible, just another absolute nightmare as your complexity goes up), console GPUs are (and have always been) extremely underpowered in terms of compute (but good with textures), etc.

Limited uses? Sure. Otherwise hell no. It's never been more than a gimmick GPU vendors use to show off (in real-time, offline rendering is something else entirely).
I can't imagine you would want any major new transportation technologies released without being tested on public roads?
It is one thing to get an idea from someone else and beat them with a superior implementation. It's a whole different thing to partner with said someone else to implement their idea, then sabotage the project from the inside while simultaneously working on your own, competing, implementation.

The fact that those guys sued FB and got an extremely generous settlement tells everything you need to know about the likeliness of there being grounds for the claim. Truth be told, they won the lottery by being zucked, there's no way in Heaven or Hell they would have managed to build their own idea into such a success to get that kind of exit.
> That is acceptable according to every car driver.

All of them, I mean you took a poll? that must have taken a while.

My understanding (as a non-US resident) is that parts of the US are built around the assumption you drive.
How We Nuke
Were they? Individuals are more than capable of learning linear algebra, web frameworks, or any given hot tech in SV. Those historical loners had the massive disadvantage of not having reams of material detailing it and in some cases didn't have modern science because they invented it.

There's almost nothing going on in SV that actually requires large teams or funding, that's just how things are done. Even if individuals have disadvantages v groups, those disadvantages aren't obvious when the phds and top of the class people at Google are building incompatible chat apps (what do they have, 4?) and those at Facebook are forgetting to renew security certs so that VR headsets don't stop working. There's a massive amount of inefficiency there, and at times mediocrity, and that's possible when everyone can pass the buck. It's not nuclear fusion.

Surely the people at those companies as individuals are capable of producing much more than that?
This is a silly interpretation of the data. You can tell because up to now, Uber could've been characterized as having an infinitely better fatality rate than the baseline. Which also would've been a silly thing to say. If a single data point takes you from infinitely better to 50x worse, the correct interpretation is: Not enough data.
The United States government led by the Obama administration came up with values from 6-9 million dollars when weighing marginal costs of safety regulations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/business/economy/17regulat...
> But how much human labour that is as complicated as driving has been automated?

Driving is not complicated at its core. Travel along vectors that intersect at well-defined angles. Stop to avoid obstacles whose vectors intersect with yours.

Sometimes those obstacles will intersect with your vector faster than you can stop, which is probably what happened to this woman. As long as the autonomous car was following the prescribed laws, then it's not at fault, and a human definitely would not have been able to stop either.

> Merely dealing with lighting conditions, weather conditions, and traffic conditions is immensely complicated. The software requirements are extremely daunting.

Which is why self-driving cars don't depend on visual light, and why prototypes are being tested in regions without inclement weather. Being on HN, I'm sure you're well familiar with the product development cycle: start with the easiest problem that does something useful, then generalize as needed.

> With autonomous cars, you see these videos from Google and Uber showing a car driving around, but people have not taken it past 80 percent. It's one of those problems where it's easy to get to the first 80 percent, but it's incredibly difficult to solve the last 20 percent. If you have a good GPS, nicely marked roads like in California, and nice weather without snow or rain, it's actually not that hard.

Right, so the experts agree with me that the problem the pilot projects are addressing is readily solvable, and that general deployment will take a number of years of further research, but isn't beyond our reach. This past year I've already read about sensors that can peer through ice and snow. 15 years is not at all out of the question.
Your server should still have POST size limitations and other limits to prevent DoS.
For inputs that are going to get hashed that seems reasonable, as well as for single-purpose systems. On the flipside, this seems like a great way to have unintended consequences downstream in more complex systems. That "out of memory" condition may appear as an ephemeral bug or slowdown that surfaces not at input time but at retrieval by another service.
I’d argue that it is consistent with the decadence and infantalization of certain parts of society.
If that is an accurate quote, I don't really see it calling for violence which is what people seem to be damning her for. Rather, it seems like that's what she's suggesting is that a certain segment of the population will never be convinced not to be racist because they've just been racist for too long. The only way for racism to die out in America, then, is for this segment of the population to die out as well.

A lot of American GIs coming back from WWII, Korea, and Vietnam developed a real and lasting hatred of all Asians. Nothing would change their mind because of their wartime experiences. The only thing that will change that feeling in American culture is when those men all die and nobody else carries such experiences with them.
What is wrong with variational autoencoders?
> If it’s a breach, the problem is the system by Facebook. If that’s true, then there must be a “bug” (technical or not) that Kogan exploited in the system

Kogan exploited Facebook's lack of verification around restricting third parties' data access to that which users had authorized to be accessed by third parties. He should have only been able to collect a quarter of a million users' data. He was given access to more than he was properly authorized to access.

Kogan also exploited Facebook's lack of verification around his use and retention of the former's users' data.

> Yet the bug is the system itself

Which is why we're talking about regulation.
There's a lot of reasons one could expect Amazon bucks many of these trends. Prime subscriptions, Amazon Marketplace, and Fulfillment by Amazon are all them leveraging their infrastructure for selling additional bottom-line contributions.

Amazon also participates in a huge number of specialty retail businesses that have higher margins as well, like automotive products, beauty products, digital music, games, and video.

I don't think there's any wall street Analyst who would predict Amazon's businesses in maturity wouldn't beat the 3-4% margins you might see at Walmart or Target.
Random stow: Amazon’s secret weapon in the warehouse wars is chaos
Wat a completely terrible thing to say. This isn't about saving a life, this is about not killing somebody. Just because a company like Uber thinks it can make a lot of money doen't mean it can simply take risks like these.
I mix them up using a CSPRNG to flip a coin.
> Just ease the regulations on...

My brother lived off Geary for a few years and went to a few public meetings on the proposed subway line they want to put under it. He was interested in the idea, as the N-Judah is a methadone clinic (last he was there a few years ago, caveats apply). He never saw such NIMYism and such tight resistance by the property owners on Geary to any improvements whatsoever.

You don't just ease regulations or really do anything 'big' in any city. Palms must be greased, and if you do not it is a horrific process that takes at least a decade.

I'm not saying that you are wrong about the free market. However, my brother thought that the most fantastic thing about the new Star Trek movies (esp. the new Wrath of Khan) was not the warp-drive, nor the aliens, but the very tall building in SF. Even in 400 years, there is no way the planning boards would allow such things.
Inside the Cave: Obama's Digital Campaign (2012) [pdf]
Civil suits are intended to serve both purposes - compensation and deterrent (punitive vs compensatory damages). E.g. if you sue a company for doing you damage, the compensatory damages are based only on the injury you suffered, but punitive damages' presence and severity is affected by things like the level of negligence of the company.

The theoretical difference with criminal charges is that criminal charges deal with harms to the difference sovereign (ie the state and the public) that need to be punished regardless of the wishes of the immediate victim. e.g. you're not allowed to settle a murder charge out of court.
IBM Unveils World’s Smallest Computer– “It’s Smaller Than a Grain of Salt”
I don't even know how some US manufacturers stay in business with how abysmal they are at actually conducting business.

I work in aerospace product development, and my company has projects where we can source components from anywhere and projects where components must be US-supplied.

If I need a 12-fiber Male MT to Female MTP custom wiring harness I have to play email and phone rinky-dink with some regional rep for weeks to get it ordered when dealing with US-based suppliers. Then it has to go up and down the "value adding" chain between the rep, the sales department, business management, purchasing, and finally manufacturing. I have to have an account, deal with purchase orders, and the terms are usually 30-90 days ARO.

Or I can send a crudely-drawn picture with connector part numbers and some basic length figures to a cable house in China, get a quote the next business day, and order the damn thing with a credit card and have it in my hands in a week or two.

And no, the quality is no different. OM3 is OM3, Amphenol connectors are Amphenol connectors, and skill is almost irrelevant when the whole thing gets done up in the same automated fusion splicer that a US firm would use.

With US-based companies that are actually subsidiaries of international firms, I have an entire address book full of points of contact in the "mothership".

With US-based companies that have substantial overseas presences, like the company formerly known as GE Intelligent Platforms, even then the overseas folks are less worthless than the US-based ones.

It actually is a major source of job dissatisfaction when I have to get stuff done and the only POC I have for something I need is "sales@uscompany.ignore.me" when I know for stone-cold certain that there's a Wang Da Nian in Shenzhen who will abuse Google Translate for hours trying to get my employer's money.
As soon as they start inheriting houses they will also be against lower housing prices.
Why is a bike going at speed when the light is red? Shouldn't the bike also stop at the red light?
In India, Ola also seems to have nicer car models than Uber, at least at the cheapest price point without sharing your ride with a stranger. Coupled with the wi-fi and the entertainment system (to put on whatever of the limited Apple Music set you choose) made most of my friends in Bangalore prefer it.
It's not about misconceptions, humans just aren't capable of it. Maintaining concentration when you're actively taking part in a task is doable, but maintaining concentration when you haven't had to do _anything_ for the past two hours is not. It isn't about whether the driver believes they should be paying attention or not, it's just not how human attention works.
Even if we assume that we wanted to address this for real, I fear that it will be next to impossible to actually assess whether whatever mistake caused this has actually been addressed when all the technology behind it is proprietary. I can easily see people being swayed by a well-written PR speech about how "human safety" is their "top priority" without anything substantial actually being done behind the scenes.

I think any attempts to address such issues have to come with far-ranging transparency regulations on companies, possibly including open-sourcing (most of) their code. I don't think regulatory agencies alone would have the right incentives to actually check up on this properly.
There is no safe (measurable) level of lead in the bloodstream.

Used to be considered safe below 30 µg/dL. Then 10. Now 5, last I heard. I have no reason to believe the action level will not continue dropping further.

What amount of lead would you consider acceptable in your bloodstream?
My understanding is that rasterization really made portal hard to make. They had to jump through a bunch of hoops to make it all work. Meanwhile I understand that adding portals to raytrace quake was like an afternoon's exercise. I'm also annoyed that there's a map in overwatch where the corner mirrors don't actually reflect anything :P

I think generally with many of the tricks that have come out of SIGGRAPH for the last decade, we've really reached a point where, computationally, raytracing really is starting to have the advantage over rasterization in terms of both pixel count and object count. The struggle for the next 30 years however is going to be overcoming the tooling built around rasterization, and to a lesser extent the headstart rasterization has had in terms of hardware.

Not to sound too crazy but I also have a strong suspicion that if you tied a physics engine to a raytracer, you might get your physics 'for free' which could be a big deal for pushing forward more realistic physics too.
Given the number of fatal pedestrian hits by human drivers, I'd be interested to see how Uber's self driving cars stack up against the apes.

Having said that, one concern one has with self-driving cars is that one can't "reach an understanding" with them the same way pedestrians and drivers regularly negotiate how they're going to behave with each other.

If one doesn't know one is dealing with a self-driving car, one might consider certain situations safe, because they usually would be, but the car negotiates and notices things differently than a human.
Something similar, but self-imposed happened when they moved a whole building in Guadalajara:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Matute_Remus#Movement_of...

"In order to gain the trust of the employees he asked his wife to enter the building while the movement was taking place."
given the options are 3 domains to choose from:

1. emotionalrec.com
2. factwisdom.com
3. tdurl.uk

Smart thief simply won't follow the link.
Google gets a small cut of each sales, plus they don't have to maintain warehouses, ship stuff, etc...

Meanwhile, Amazon's "search engine" is terrible, product listing is, in my opinion, a mess, plus there's a growing problem with Chinese fakes. I'd say this seriously undermine trust in Amazon and from what I see, Bezos doesn't seem to care.

If Google can partner with a good number of reputable retailers, this could be great.
Trump is creating a toxic work environment at the US’s largest employer
Yes exactly. The direction he takes his line of thought in the postscript - expelling individual members of the engineering profession for unethical behavior - is fatuous. The big trends are driven by big money: which business models and technologies get funding.

It's not the engineer whose bug accidentally irradiated a patient that's the problem; it's the VC's investing billions in spying on and shaping human behavior.
> loss of $12M on their books

this is really hard to quantify independently, and they can use this figure to inflate their losses to claim more taxation benefit than otherwise deserved.

Why can't i say that I "lost" 12million developing my indie game, and therefore, claim some taxes off my casual contract work?
Certainty of enforcement. People are careful to obey a rule punished 100% of the time with a $1 fine. They brush off a 10^-5 probability of a $100,000 loss by thinking "It won't happen to me."
Do you program? How can you program and not be aware of the X deaths, Y privacy violations and pretend you aren't part of that system?

Is every programmer in the world partly responsible for every death caused by every programming bug ever? Should we blame all civic engineers every time a bridge collapses?

I am an individual, not "part of a system". Simply being a driver doesn't make me a reckless or dangerous one. For example, 10K of those deaths involve DUI, and I am certainly not part of that system. I'm sure 95% of drivers never kill anyone.
You gain flexibility by letting your browser handle such things. Have a look at Stylus https://github.com/openstyles/stylus, which is a privacy-conscious fork of Stylish for Chrome, also compatible with Firefox as a WebExtension.
Taxis in Hounslow with cabhit taxi cab network
The problem Facebook papers over is something that could and perhaps now should be fixed by open protocol.

The people most attached to Facebook —the people who will never give it up until it's clear it's dead— are those who want to conveniently share what they're doing with real life friends and family, as well as see what they're doing. They want a social network that everybody uses.

I think it's easy for us to forget that when we're yammering on about the problems with Facebook. The way we fix that isn't bitching about Facebook; trying to get them to be a better Facebook, or having silly dreams about writing a competitor. We don't need another Facebook, we need a better technical expression of a social network.

Something so fundamentally different that allows it to be decentralised from the gaping maws of companies like Facebook, simple enough for grandma, and built into everything; as prevalent as SMS and email.

We're not there yet. Given the powers that control these things are also the people making and selling the devices, I'm not sure we'll ever be there... But that's the problem to solve.