skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Airlines are the same way. Every time there’s been a crash they’ve learned something and changed procedures to prevent it again. It’s made flying pretty safe, unless you’re an animal flying on United...
> That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as when someone walks out into the road.

Some of these accidents are unpreventable by the (autonomous) driver. 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.

The autonomous vehicle and the human attendant might have made a glaring error, or they might have done everything correctly and still failed to prevent a fatality. It's far too early to say. It's undoubtedly a dent to the public image of autonomous vehicles, but hopefully the car's telemetry data will reveal whether this was a case of error, negligence or unavoidable tragedy.
It's really shuffling money from earnings into expanding an existing company is tax-advantaged. Let's say I own 100% of ACME, which made a $100 profit last year. Rather than receive that money as dividends and then reinvest it, which causes the money to be taxed now and for it to possibly be taxed at a higher rate than capital gains, I reinvest that money into ACME. This has the effect of deferring taxation on that profit and allows it to be taxed at the same rate as capital gains at a later date
The most obvious example I've seen is when the car (or indeed driver) has the choice to endanger the passenger or a pedestrian.

For example, if a kid runs out into the road in front of the car, it can drive into the kid, likely with no injuries to the passengers. Or it can swerve and drive off of the road, or into another lane, likely saving the kid but putting the passengers at much greater risk.

As you say, in this or any similar situation the human reaction is probably going to be to instinctively brake or swerve without a chance to consider options or consequences. I feel like a computer will have a few cycles to spare to make decisions like that.
What’s the Difference Between Ray Tracing and Rasterization?
I suppose techies don't have much need for social interaction, but for those of us outside the tech world, Facebook survives because it's useful for facilitating social interaction. I use Facebook (and occasionally Meetup) to help organize local running groups and events. Fantastically useful for coordinating with multiple groups of people across multiple computer and phone platforms, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles. Nothing else comes close.

It sounds like the author primarily used Facebook to be seen rather than to connect, and so he views it as a cancer. He doesn't understand that Facebook is a tool. The problem isn't Facebook, the problem was him. He was the cancer, treating Facebook as a platform for aggrandizing himself. Good riddance.
As a meme #deletefacebook has limited virulence because of self-termination. Probably #deletefacebookafterpostingaboutitthenwaiting would be better.
What? AI can know in the exact same way you can know. What are you talking about?
> By law, the SEC protects the confidentiality of whistleblowers and does not disclose information that might directly or indirectly reveal a whistleblower’s identity.
Digital abuse is ruining lives – one woman is giving victims power
As of late 2017, Waymo/Google reported having driven a total of 4 million miles on roads. Given that Waymo is one of the biggest players, it's hard to see how all of autonomous cars have driven 100 million miles at this point.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/27/waymo-racks-up-4-million-s...

Nevermind that the initial rollouts almost always involve locales in which driving conditions are relatively safe (e.g. nice weather and infrastructure). Nevermind that the vast majority of autonomous testing so far has involved the presence of a human driver, and that there have been hundreds of disengagements:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956902/california-dmv-s...

Humans may be terrible at driving, but the stats are far from being in favor of autonomous vehicles. Which is to be expected given the early stage of the tech.
> He's arguing from foundations. The hypothesis is that autonomous drivers should perform better at task X than the null hypothesis (aka human drivers). So any instances where autonomous drivers do not seem to perform better are all potential counter-arguments to that hypothesis.

> The fact that human drivers aren't particularly good isn't really relevant, beyond setting a correspondingly low bar within the null hypothesis.

These two paragraphs are so contradictory to each other that I'm just not even sure how to attempt to correct your confusion.
> Maduro created the currency to try to salvage his country’s failing economy, where inflation is estimated to spiral to 13,000 percent this year.

That is a shocking statement. 1) I did not know Venezuela is in such a bad state. 2) I cannot believe that a freaking government is trying to "create" money through an ICO.
Culture is comprised of many things, and some similar things, but not that. By definition, culture is merely a collective persistence, and therefor inherently superficial. Culture cannot capacitate “learning” or even lessons. Culture is limited to memetic abstractions, with a lot of alleged noise. Insofar as culture supports persistence of worthwhile norms, it would be limited to evolutionary adaptation (survival of the fittest). It’s important to distinguish to avoid the fallacy of argumentum ad populum.
That’s where the ntsb steps in and regulations created.
Have you looked at GroupMe? It has the ability to do all the "Social Planning" you need and you don't even need the app to participate in it.

I know it's more common with younger people (at my university there's not a single undergrad who doesn't have it on their phone), but I know some actual adults use it too.
Automation for airplanes is really so much simpler, a lot of that thanks to a lot of hidden human effort in keeping planes well separated so pretty much all it has to do to fly is keep course and control. If that was all we had to do for cars it'd be pretty simple.
I disagree, you're just passing the buck. Accountability needs to be had at all levels. If an engineer writes a bug into code like this (deliberate or not) and such a bug results in somebody's death, the engineer should be held accountable just as much as the person who approved its release. The executive could just as easily say "my engineers promised me it was fully tested", etc. Engineers could say "yep it was, but that was an edge case we missed" or something like that. In any case, there needs to be shared accountability. Maybe execs take the brunt, but engineers should not be allowed to write code that kills people (inadvertently or otherwise) and face zero consequences.
To maybe make it maybe better: Pedestrian B and C.
The cause of the accident was a careless driver (or algorithm) not checking before crossing a lane.

I can do it, why can't they?
Most of Hackernews seems to think that Windows 10 with WSL is a better Linux than Linux. I think they need to put down the shrooms and start drinking milk again, because I'm with you -- I just don't see it. I spent a good chunk of the weekend nursing my one Windows PC along and it was a shitshow nearly from start to finish:

* Disk I/O is incredibly slow. This is, in part, because Windows Defender intercepts all disk I/O routines, and all disk I/O goes through it so it can spot suspicious activity... like intercepting the disk I/O routines. Want to turn it off? Too bad! Windows provides a knob, but it resets itself after a time. If it hasn't happened already, Microsoft may disconnect this button from any useful function, making it a placebo like NYC walk-signal pushbuttons.

* At one point, while slogging through a Visual Studio install, Windows decided to nag me with a modal-over-everything dialog: "We have an update for you. Windows is a service, and updates are part of that service. So... yeah, if you could go ahead and restart now, that would be terrific." That last sentence is an exaggeration, but you get the idea. I don't want to be passive-aggressed to by a piece of equipment I bought with my own money. Oh, and the computer was thrashing so hard with all this derring-do that it took the better part of a minute with absolutely no response for the click to register and the dialog to dismiss. I felt like I was back on my old 386SX trying to make Windows 3.1 go in 2 MiB of RAM. Doubtless some bureaucrat who lives inside NTOSKRNL.EXE noticed that it took me longer than average to press the button -- and that I chose to delay the Windows Update while Visual Studio finished installing -- and made a note in my personnel file for further review by management. I'm expecting another dialog to pop up informing me that Windows has put me on an action plan.

* Somehow, the update process obliterated my Microsoft Office license, requiring me to "repair my installation" (meaning redownload and reinstall Office and reauthenticate in order to reregister and reactivate the reinstalled copy).

So no, I simply don't see how people live with this day to day, let alone prefer it to Linux. Ubuntu could drop you into FVWM from 1995 and it'd still be more productive than this. Even the rudest Unix environment is not this actively hostile.
I don't think so, the images were pretty low res iirc. I did some googling though, and the only thing I found was somebody that said "the game reads the model data out from the file's alpha channel". However, I'd expect the data to just be appended to the end of the file, since PNG works anyway with that.
There is no data available at the moment to draw conclusions that self-driving cars bring less fatalities, and rightly so, because they have not been tested on a beta stage. You are only guessing and hoping.
Thanks, I appreciate the check. Sorry about that jobigoud.
> Yes, anyone can write, but not everyone can write well.

Either she thinks people who write do not have the potential to write well, or, she meant to say "...but not everyone writes well." The former is a little presumptuous, the latter is, well, poor writing.

I actually do not even see the point in projecting her experiences with writing onto others. She could have gotten the same point across without the awkward introduction. It could have been framed a little more personably, e.g., "I notice that my bad writing all stems from an unstructured process. Here is the process which has helped me to write well more consistently..."
That kind of design only makes right hook collisions more likely. Pushing cyclists closer to the curb, to the periphery of a driver's view, makes them less visible and more likely to be unseen before a turn is made.
"Uber has paused self-driving operations in Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto, which is a standard move, the company says."

...there's a "standard move" when one of their cars kills someone?

I don't think that really came across the way they wanted it to.
This is somewhat true. However, if you stop adding data to your profile it becomes stale. Since I deleted my facebook profile I moved cities, bought a house, a different car, and have new friends in real life. My old FB profile is probably still a good indicator of which way I'd vote in an election, but it's useless now for targeted advertising. The only way to make that break is to delete your profile now; slowly over time your real life will start to change and eventually won't resemble the digital you at all.
I'm surprisingly okay with self-driving cars stopping for plastic bags in the near term.

Self driving tech is up against the marketing arm of the auto-industry, they've got to be better than perfect to avoid public backlash. If they're a bit slower but far safer then I think they'll do well.
Ask HN: Are you more likely to join sites offering Social Auth?
I've been having a lot of internal dialogue lately, weighing the pros and cons of Social Authentication for account setup. What are your thoughts on the matter? Still absolutely required? Do most of your signups happen with or without it?

The biggest pro in my book is the speed in getting a new application up and running. Without having to worry about user authentication, password resets, etc.
What I Learned from the Fall of Ellen Pao
The entire potential of self-driving cars shouldn't be dismissed based on accidents like this - that would be an unfortunate side effect of these headlines. But I also reckon this coverage actually incentivizes better and safer programs. It's such early days, we simply need more data to form sound opinions. In the meantime, journalism is serving an important role here.
This will be the first major test of liability and insurance with a self-driving vehicle.
Would they do it enough times for such observation to have any statistical significance?
Can't you avoid this (on recent Android versions at least) by disabling all permissions? That's what I did.

(I'm sure they're still analyzing the messages I send and how I interact with the app, of course.)
I think their (idiotically stated) point was that there are plenty of situation where you can kill someone on the road in an accident and not have any legal liability for it.
Agreed. I think the geekery behind the project (Jiminez and Co) have their hearts in the right place and the govt sees a chance to profit.

Fingers crossed.
US boy, 9, 'kills sister, 13, over controller'
As a pure safety judgement that'd depend on:

a) what % of disengagements are 'to avoid accidents' vs navigating an entirely safe but complex situations. For ex: a parked UPS truck on a narrow 2 lane rd.

b) the degree of real-world complexity the tests the cars are engaging in (compared to other vendors). For ex: testing cars on simple suburban routes = fewer disengagements.

Not trying to defend Uber here, I'm just trying to understand the distinction between a high-level general statistic and it's real world implications.
Is 1 really that big of a mistake? I understand that it's a mistake to build a fully functional game engine to then use in production but building just enough to better grok the internals seems like invaluable information to me
Well, did you go to the URL so that that user will know they used an insecure service?
Snapchat isn't a Facebook company
So... Can we buy the product?
My point is that "the stats" don't exist if you're only looking at one autonomous car accident without comparing it to the relevant statistics from human accidents.
Yup that's the right one. Here's a link straight to it: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/on-the-media-2018-03-16
Anec-dataly, I agree. We live at the edge of a residential area where there is a long stretch of road with bike lanes and turns into the residential area every block. Not only do people regularly drive in the bike lanes, the people who do so are typically the most aggressive and inattentive drivers who are trying to angrily speed around the lines of cars who are driving the speed limit and respecting the stop signs. I'm not aware of any recent accidents, but only because cyclists seem to just completely avoid the entire stretch of road.
The more important number here is the revenue to market cap ratio, which is very similar for both Apple and Amazon. Earnings numbers are fairly arbitrary for businesses that aren't being operated in a steady state.
Graphics programmers have been predicting this revolution for almost as long as I can remember. It's quite exciting that so many of the big players seem to believe it is almost time.
Programming Blockchains Step-by-Step
That kind of thing might fly in some arenas, but judges have literally no sense of humor when evidence is “lost” in a criminal case, or civil wrongful death suit. That’s more or less a quick way to lose in the worst possible way.
I came here to say just this. Boostnote isn't 1:1 from what I can tell at a cursory glance of Quiver's features but I've enjoyed its progression even if I barely use it. I've had a rudimentary workflow of just text files in TextWrangler that should honestly get dumped into boost but I'm too lazy to even save the documents most of the time (80-90% of it is temporary ideas) much less properly categorize them.
Why would the military filter if below average people could do meaningful work today?

Okay they don't filter 50%, only 15% but that's still many people
Tesla doesn’t have self driving capability, their autopilot is just driver assistance (like adaptive cruise control).
> We're not actually running out of anything vital. Sorry.

You're absolutely correct and it's a shame you're being downvoted. I have lived in the third world and I can confidently declare than people in the west have much bigger ecological footprints (by any metric you can think of :energy usage, pollution, weight of garbage thrown out, etc). Contrast this with the low-productivity of third world farming (per unit area, relatively) as well as massive unrealized potential for hydro-electrical and other renewable energy. I'm going to say there is plenty of capacity for accommodating population growth.
Really? This is a completely new tech, and process. How is any reaction "a standard move?" I guess it could be standard for any new tech to result in a death from autonomous machinery. In any case, things like this are why I don't think fully autonomous is nearly ready in city environments. I'm not saying it isn't close, and shouldn't be worked on. I just don't think the intelligence systems are near as worked out as they should be. Not to mention the level of sensors needed.
So the developers hand over the code and then ask for payment? Doesn't that usually happen the other way around?
There is certainly at least SOME data. At the very least, let's find out how many miles Uber's self-driving program has driven. Then, we can, at least, compare deaths per miles driven to a human driver.
Sad to hear it's happened this soon but this was inevitable.
I think the comment you are replying to was just clarifying, since the parent to their post implied wrongly that the person was in a crosswalk.

But yeah. We all agree it's not cool to run down pedestrians or bikers or pedestrians walking bikes etc. no matter where they may be.
If you hold developers responsible, you can kiss self driving cars goodbye.

What should be passed (but I can't see how) is a percentage of allowed deaths, at least in the early years, and set it to something like 5-10% of the current rate, reducing downwards to 1% after 20 years.

People will die from self driving cars, and undoubtably their will eventually be a case that is 100% the self driving car's fault. The benefit of self driving cars comes from the mistake being permanently fixed, while with human drivers it can be committed over and over again.

There needs to be some kind of protection on the companies (and obviously the developers, I've never heard someone try to say they should be held responsible before) from lawsuits. Otherwise all it'll take a is a small handful beefore companies will just let it die.
> I suppose techies don't have much need for social interaction

Sure....
Does the SEC have a line item in its budget for whistleblower awards? If so what do they do if there are a lot of cases to pay out? Can they run out of money for these things? I'd love to know what that process looks like.
I'm guessing people are downvoting because of the implication that the software team should be held responsible?

Something does feel wrong about punishing them when the decision to put the car on the road in the first place was almost certainly not their own.

Though I agree Uber should be held accountable for it and it shouldn't be a token fine since the whole point of punishing an accident like this is to discourage them from occurring in the first place.

This sort of accident orchestrated by a group of people probably won't be gracefully handled by our legal system.
I have not heard anyone argue for requiring >=10 characters (9 is the highest requirement I've ever seen). 12+ I've heard being said as "if you really want to do it properly" in security reports for clients, but we know that'll hardly ever be followed for anything other than high-security places like sysadmins at a bank. I've never heard anyone say 16+, let alone it being the standard recommendation for years.

Most (all?) places that discover that 9+ is not good enough for the most valuable credentials, move to 2FA instead.
actually i slow down for plastic bags. And not because i care for their safety.
Great points and extremely important.

But at the same time, I don't personally want to go back to an age before automobiles became commonplace. They're too useful to me.

Is that selfish? Sure. But our lives are all shaped by our wants, not by our needs.
Im sure the people making quick asset flips won’t mind that.
Seven Books for Advancing Your Soft Skills as a Programmer
> What does the statistics say? How many miles have the self-driving cars driven, and how many deaths were they responsible for? How does it compare to a human driver?

As of December 2017 Uber had driven 2 million autonomous miles[1]. Let's be generous and double that, so 4 million.

The NHTSA reports a fatality rate (including pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers) of 1.25 deaths per 100 million miles[2], twenty five times the distance Uber has driven.

You probably shouldn't extrapolate or infer anything between those two statistics, they're pretty meaningless because we don't have nearly enough data on self driving cars. But since you asked the question, that's the benchmark: 1.25 deaths per 100 million miles.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2017/12/22/ubers-self...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
Is this restriction more common in certain countries?

In the US, I've fortunately never seen paste blocked on a login page. Wondering why.
> You can’t replace yourself with a computer program and then choose to take only the benefits and not the responsibilities.

Look, I'm all for developers and (software companies in general) to be considering the ethical implications of the work they do, and the moral obligations that they take on as a result of it. However:

> We need to discuss how the developers self-driving cars will be held accountable for the crimes they commit. There is no reason the person who programs or the person who makes money from a self-driving car should be held less accountable for a crime that if committed directly by a person would almost certainly result in jail time. You can’t replace yourself with a computer program and then choose to take only the benefits and not the responsibilities.

This is a bad mentality to take with postmortems for software failures in general, at least from the outset. You need to look at the underlying factors that contributed to the issue, not simply looking for a person to assign blame to. It's possible that negligence is the underlying cause, but not necessarily - and even if negligence is a cause, what were the other cultural factors that led to the negligence happening, without being caught somewhere else in the pipeline? It's tempting to look to assign blame, but if you do that, you'll actually miss out on the systemic improvements that would be necessary to prevent similar incidents in the future.

But moreover, this is a bad outlook to take here, because this wouldn't be criminal behavior if committed by a human. From the best we can tell, given the details available so far, it's an accident, and it's very rare for criminal charges to even be considered in accidents like these, unless it's a hit-and-run.
The first martyr of the AI age, I suppose.
Analytics is Broken - It's Time for a Change
This breaks the site guideline against calling names in comments. Could you please not do that? Your comment would be much better without the last sentence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html