skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Simply counting traffic fatalities suggests that crazy pedestrians causing unavoidable accidents cannot be common, even if every single pedestrian accident were both unavoidable and the pedestrians "fault" (although I'd argue that ethically it must be primarily the vehicles fault, but that's another story).

And that'ss with humans behind the wheel: lazy, distracted, slow to react fleshbags that we are.

I'm not sure that a truly unavoidable accident would occur even once a year in a fictional world in which all drivers were perfect and had millisecond reaction speeds.

What is obvious however, is that these situations are so rare as to be irrelevant. In practice accidents are avoidable by the driver of the vehicle - or at least avoidable to such an extent that it's not worth considering the other cases.

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, when there's simply not enough evidence to make that kind of determination yet. Let's not forget that part of the privilege of being allowed to participate in traffic implies a responsibility not to kill people even when they behave unexpectedly.

For some statistical perspective: if human drivers had as many fatal accidents per mile as uber has, then the average male driver would kill 1 person in his lifetime (men drive more). Clearly: that's absurd; people may cause too many accidents, but not nearly that many - and that's being rather charitable to uber's self-driving vehicles, since they have back-up drivers and thus don't count complicated traffic situations, and safety drivers, and thus may well have caused more accidents by themselves. So going purely by the unusual-ness of such an accident with so few miles, I'd say the initial assumption must be that this is likely a bug in uber's car, even if I'm sure there were contributing factors.

Edit: I guess it's not surprising wikipedia has stats on the influence of alcohol on fatalities, but it tops out at 4 times the legal limit - at which point human drivers are still safer than this (sample size of one...) uber record so far. :-/
I think there is a case for open sourcing the decision making code for this exact reason.
They're now getting their doors kicked in by the Information Commissioner: https://twitter.com/traciemac_Bmore/status/97582507693856768...

(how much will be left after they pre announced the raid on twitter I don't know)
If a human kills a human, we have someone in the direct chain of command that we can punish. If an algorithm kills a person... who do we punish? How do we punish them in a severe enough way to encourage making things better?

Perhaps, similar to airline crashes, we should expect Uber to pay out to the family, plus a penalty fine. 1m per death? 2? What price to we put on a life?
I‘m quite sure this would backfire A LOT in terms of brand damage. Uber in a sense made history today and now has actual blood on their hands. And if such a strategy should EVER leak (Dieselgate anyone?), people are going to prison.
Ride sharing works for young professionals who aren't moving around with kids. I grew up in a public transit city. I then got a car in the US. The car is a strictly better experience, and only marginally more expensive. Ride sharing can reduce the problem, but "100% solve the problem" is off by about 95 percentage points.
It would be impossible to stay alert as a safety driver.
Was gonna post almost the same idea. You don't need a true "rail" to keep an autonomous car from mowing over people. You need something that's pretty binary "am I on my pre-approved area or not". A special kind of paint or something very low-tech could be the solution.

There will still be the last-mile problem. Even if the "rail" is just cheap paint, you'll almost definitely never have 100% of roads painted, and paint wears over time or gets buried under snow etc.

Eventually we're looking for ways to add "more 9s" to the reliability and safety. A non-rail rail could add a bunch of 9s to well-trafficked routes.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16621507 since it has become its own separate discussion.
So, can someone ELI5 this? What exactly did he do wrong here?

He was monitoring basis points to attempt to capitalize on it. But the SEC accused him of manipulating the markets?

I don't think he hacked any systems doing this. I don't think he created a fraudulent pyramid scheme here.

Did he violate some kind of public trust?
I am looking into their experiments. Seems most of them are pretty simple predictions/classifications. No wonder they get good results.

The claim is too bold and I would reject this paper
They should clarify that the data is good enough for linear regression. Not to say there is no difference between real and syn data.
That is what the comment is saying. Of course the vision stuff is done with machine learning - that is after all the state of the art. But that is a tiny part of the self-driving problem. So you can recognize pedestrians, other cars, lanes, signs, maybe even infer velocity and direction from samples over time. But then the high-level planning phase isn't typically a machine learning model, and so if you record all the state (Uber better do or that's a billion dollar lawsuit right there) you can go back and determine if the high-level logic was faulty, the environment was incomplete etc.
There was an episode of Darkwing Duck (which shared a couple characters and I presume a lot of writers with DuckTales) that serves as an amazing parable for why vehicles are usually better off adapting to the environment than the other way around. The episode is called "Extinct Possibility", and might (or might not) be watchable at the following URL.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uAqZ_jMmGAk
(I do geometry but I'm not in the gaming field)

I'd guess that this is because the fastest way to compute a precise silhouette of an arbitrary shape (like quadratic surfaces) is to do a ray test for every pixel that might hit the surface. You could project the surface onto the image plane to get boundary curves, but (a) determining the curves that make up that silhouette is a complicated geometric process that's prone to numerical error in weird edge cases (of which there are lots) and (b) once you have the projected curves, you still have to actually shade the interior, which require you to project back onto the original surface to figure out the normal, texture, etc. At that point, you're essentially doing little ray tests for each pixel anyway, so why not just raytrace the whole thing? The global illumination approximation is much much better with raytracing, and modern GPUs can do it real-time.

By the way, modelling everything as an analytic surface rather than as a discretized polygon mesh is called "Boundary Representation" or b-rep, and it's what's used in solid CAD programs that engineers use, like Solidworks or Inventor. Engineers and designers like analytic surfaces because they have "infinite" resolution, but even those CAD programs almost invariably polygonalize b-rep to a mesh and then render the mesh, because it's expensive to hit-test all the surfaces involved; computers only recently became able to do that fast enough for real time interaction, and most CAD programs are old old old.
So you think the majority of the people you are referring to, were using condoms and most of them failed? I think that is unlikely. If it is unlikely then it means the fact they have kids are a reflection of their decision making, self-control, etc.

I don't believe all children are planned. Is it harder to get started in life with kids? Of course. When you choose a hard path life is harder. Not impossible, but harder. As I said, I know families with a whole lot of kids and not much education that do just fine through hard work and very careful budgeting.
You don't have to trick the state into thinking that the ticket hasn't been tampered with, just the next person who buys a scratcher.
> New World Order

I've memed this online and to friends. It doesn't help that one Ethereum Foundation member was celebrating on twitter about how esoteric people are in the EF even saying that there are oculist members.
Making evidence disappear is indeed inconceivable. Especially for a firm of Uber's stature.
They'll struggle to get anywhere asking for cash. Australians generally carry little to no cash around
Of course it's the best opportunity..because the Chinese also manufacture industrial machines.
I'm from Africa but the the minimal wage here is so afordable and close to be shipping ports...perhaps we can discuss further about this
i have also had the same thoughts over the years
arnauldkayonga1@gmail.com
Confused by the downvote here. This is a perfectly legitimate question, and indeed it should be asked more, not less, often.
> When I had to go from my Palm Pre to an android phone it was a giant leap backwards in functionality and usability. They got so many things right from the get-go with WebOS, but it would have had to have been perfect to break into the already existent duopoly.

It wasn't a duopoly at the time though the first public release of webOS followed Android's by just a few months, Symbian and LiMo/Tizen were still players in potentia, …. And between the innovative yet intuitive interface and web-based tech[0], many people were super excited by webOS.

The issue is the Spring exclusivity (distant third) hurt, Palm flubbed the original hardware quality-wise, and they didn't have the breadth (or balls?) to build a consumer-oriented version (purely software interface) and leave the hardware keyboard behind.

[0] though that also caused real issues wrt performances.
Imagine someone carrying a couple of two by fours they are holding vertically. They then stop on the sidewalk to check their phone at just the right angle. I am not really giving specific examples, as much as trying to illustrate that the way ML systems fail isn't by being slightly off from the intended programming, but by being really off.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Introducing the ability to connect to Google Cloud Shell from any terminal
How to set up a company online (5 steps to doing it properly)
Missing /s
The roller coaster setup seems so feasible. What are we waiting for?

I guess the obvious problem is that it would require simultaneously modding both private vehicles and public infrastructure at impossible scale.

It seems like such an obvious design end but implementation would require communism :/.
> Screen space reflections also work

Screen space reflections are an amazing trick and work really well for _some_ things, like reflective floors, water bodies, or objects the player might be holding near the camera (e.g. a weapon)

Since they can't reflect the back sides of objects, or anything outside the camera frustum (which includes the player model) they can't be used for things like mirrors.

The appearance of the reflections being 'clipped' with objects leaving the frustum as you move your head is also quite jarring on VR.
Around here most of my friends have moved from WhatsApp to Telegram after Facebook aquired WhatsApp.

Instagram is fairly popular as well but WhatsApp never really went mainstream.
> People don't really need another city sim.

Interesting you say that, meanwhile Cities Skylines is the only city sim game I know of that's come out in the last 10 years that isn't ruined by EA or a shitware Farmville clone.
I'm not defending their position. Just clarifying what they meant. :) If someone has a better service, many people in the US feel it is just fine for them to capture a lot of the market and this isn't an inequality issue. Others think that if someone makes more money than someone else, it is inequality and should be "fixed."
Are there coding bootcamp scholarships specifically for women?
If you want to get into an elite college, there are a "series of steps and little quirks" which will help you. Upper-middle class families can afford to put their kids in SAT/ACT tutoring to push their scores into the upper percentiles. They can also put their kids into summer math/science programs to help them test-out of the regular track at school and bolster their college apps.

Even for parents who don't make a whole lot of money but still went to college can give powerful guidance to their children. They know what colleges are "looking for" since they've already been through the process. They know what awards to collect and extracurricular/leadership opportunities to improve their chances. Plus they can tutor their own kids, which disadvantaged/immigrants parents will struggle with.
This might be right up your alley -- http://tachyons.io/
I also use a similar approach and thus love functional CSS :)
What distressed countries like Venezuela lack is trust, making the prospect of a responsible central bank a pipe dream. I see asset backed certificates being more capable of facilitating trade than unsecured IOUs. Reduce the level of trust required to trade, trade goes up. In that aspect Petro coin will be very interesting. I'm smelling a regime change in Venezuela's near future.
Wouldn't almost all developed nations have utilized and then phased out lead paints?
Thank you for telling this story :(

Situations where countries try to dictate this kind of thing outside their borders produce stupid bad results. A previous example: no maps are legal in both India and Pakistan. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=...
> "Population bomb" is not defused, only "birth rate" is decreasing.

This is all that needed to be said about the article. The author doesn't (want to) understand the difference between a number "getting smaller" and the number "increasing less quickly".

When someone gains 10 kg in January and then gains 9 kg in February, we don't say that they are losing weight.
Direct link to announcement: https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/forensic-audits-cambrid...
I think the idea that self driving cars "may not ever be" safer than human drivers is ludicrous, even fatuous. We set an abysmally low bar for safety.

I think that is why the very assertive "Are you saying..." is appropriate.
Median is a type of average, as is Mean, as is Mode.
The barbarian hordes wandering through weren't tourists. They were taking the food that you needed in order to not starve. And if you tried to stop them, they killed you.

Now, you could (in the abstract) say that a better, more just, and more responsive society emerged. But for those who went through it, there were a bunch of new ways to die.
What are the top three tech jobs in 2018?
Database constraints in Postgres: The last line of defense
I'm not sure I understand, but the high bit here is that bringing in someone else's personal details crosses into personal attack and isn't ok.
Show HN: Cronhub – Painless Cron Monitoring
Why not both? Back in 2006 I helped someone complete a Flash puzzle game. The whole thing was a an interesting programming experience. His lead developer had family issues to tend to and I stepped in. He would come up with game-play ideas and I would prototype them while also working completing the whole game. It was a blast. The ideas that he would bring to me were greatly influenced by what he thought I could pull off in the alotted time. After I was done, he later hired some other devs and told me he found himself limiting his ideas because those guys weren't as good at implementing them. In that respect he definitely hit technical limitations even though he was working on non-technically challenging games on a well known platform.

Similarly, there was no state-of-the-art coding in this game:

* http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html

They had plenty of technical challenges pushing the performance of ActionScript in browsers at the time in order to keep the game moving smoothly.
Xilinx Pushes 'Adaptive Computing' Under New CEO
Ola has been a pretty interesting company. They have tried a lot of things like integrating auto ricks into their network (which Uber has copied now), including Wifi, on board entertainment, pool pass, membership rates etc. They even had boat service when Chennai (my city) was flooded. I wish them good luck!
I guess with games there is already temporal anti-aliasing (TAA), so that would be an effective denoising technique if one was using noisy ray/path tracing.
Cambridge Analytica, Trump-Tied Political Firm, Offered to Entrap Politicians
Exactly. Also doesnt say much about Oprah maturing - search youtbe on “oprah saying white people need to die”
I guess everything has become emails and messages now but back when I dealt with local manufacturers (ie machine shops, PCB, etc,) I would just drop by their office and talk with their engineers, brainstorm on the white board, etc. And if your employer was big enough, they would come to your office.
My old comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15076613

So much talk about LIDAR and other sensors. Why nobody talks about obvious idea of Road Object Message Bus? ROMB is a protocol where each road object (a traffic light, a sign, a car, a bicycle, etc.) transmits info about itself. A car could broadcast its direction vector, intention to turn, any non ROMB moving object it sees. A traffic light could broadcast current state and when it is going to change. That information would greatly enhance overall security, especially during rain and snow conditions, when even LIDAR fails.

Self-driving is such important (just after eliminating combustion engines) that we could upgrade existing cars with cheap ROMB boxes. Vehicle GPS tracking system costs about $30. ROMB box would cost about $60. Let's say that from 2027 all cars have to have a ROMB box to enter a downtown ...

Let's say your car ROMB received info about the white truck, while your car cameras and vision recognition systems see just a cloud and any truck in 100 m range.

ROMB purpose is not to replace cameras or LIDARs, but to extend gathered info.
I’m not sure who is downvoting this, but there are 1.74 people killed per billion KM on the Autobahn. This compares with 1.16 in the U.K. and 3.38 in the U.S.

Having driven about 2000KM on the Autobahn as a tourist the lane etiquette on the Autobahn is the best I’ve ever seen, and I’ve driven through the U.S. (both East and West coast) and much of Europe. It’s no surprise to me that the Germans can drive on de-restricted roads and have the one of the lowest number of deaths (HIGHWAYS ONLY) in the world.
That depends entirely on best practice among CAs, something we've seen multiple CAs bend the rules on. Any one is enough to make the attack undetected.

An attack against the global public DNSSEC would be much harder to mount undetected, as it is logged and cached by nature of its design.
There is a different and IMO better way to solve the global scope problem in CSS. Adapted from the Paul Irish method of executing JS you can use data attributes to conditionally write CSS. For example a new user controller would output the controller and action names as data attributes on the body. I then have a separate css file under `assets/users/new.scss` which only contains css for that page. Your Sass code looks something like:

[data-controller="user_controller"][data-action="new"] {
.header {
background-color: blue;
}
}

This method keeps you organized and completely removes the biggest problem most people have with CSS.
I can confirm iranian government not only does not have any problem with word Kurdistan, Iran has an official Province called Kurdistan, and it is constitutional. (same with Iraq) and I am form Iran living in USA, I should be allowed to enter my hometown's province, just like every other iranian proviince( Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, ...) but Facebook enforces Turkey's disgusting rules on Iran too.
Also known as propaganda.
Every person in the US pushing communism or even just socialism should be required to spend a month in Venezuela. If you come back alive, then we can have "a conversation."
In math, this is fine, as long as you can show that your assumptions are consistent.

If you disprove something in physics, you at the same time prove the negative of the something. Of course the negative of a theory is not really a theory by itself.
Just ease the regulations on building height and density, and multi-story multi-family buildings will start to appear in good locations through free market capitalism.
Have fun shipping a real product on OpenGL without a proprietary binary driver blob.
The BBC aired a documentary about Cambridge Analytica and how Trump's digital strategy team used Facebook using the information gathered through analytics to target people.

Evidence this thing exists: https://twitter.com/bbcstories/status/896752720522100742

It's been a while, but I am pretty damn sure in this documentary it was mentioned that due to the amount of money the Trump campaign invested in their digital strategy efforts people from Facebook were assisting them on site to make sure everything went smoothly.

And now the same company who at that time happily took Trumps money and gave the campaign full assistance (and thus being fully aware of the kind of gray area shit CA was pulling off) is making them look like cyber criminals, likely to just look "good" (while they actually were just as bad) and virtue signal the living shit out of this incident.

Amazing.
According to the below, there are other suspicious deaths (no cause determined, or conflicting info on cause of death) in countries like the US & Greece:

https://www.axios.com/russian-diplomats-keep-dying-unexpecte...
Please don't paste old comments into new conversations. Especially not twice in the same thread!
I hope you realize that facebook keeps all information you are deleting in the back end. You are completely wasting your time.
Also a lot better for simple use cases since it doesn't require an email address.
Not the OP.

That's good information you posted. Thank you!
It's not just about punishment though. It's about our brains being (mostly) good at saying "well they were unlucky, but I'd never find myself in that situation, so I'm OK." And with some brains wired for anxiety doing the opposite and instead only thinking about how they are the ones that would be in all those situations.
As in the famous Churchhill quote, once you agree it's not infinite, now we're just dickering about price.

I'd say you're almost right about nobody asking for infinite value, but I'd say it's more like nobody who has pulled this up to the conscious level is asking for infinite value. People who have not examined the belief are quite prone to speaking as if life's value is infinite... but their own actions inevitably belie that claim. Once examined, it becomes rationally obvious that life is not infinitely valuable (including your own), but, well, if humans automatically accepted and believed all rational things they examine without emotional consequence the world would be a very different place.
>Then the BR (F2P) mode was added and the whole thing blew up.

Summary of video games in the last 5 years.
Whilst I imagine it is horrible to be in a car that drives someone over, I don't think the driver deserves the brunt of the sympathy in that situation.
Not the init daemon?
Does iOS give you the APIs you’d need to know if the device was locked or the state of the screen when you’re in the background?
CNN says she was walking her bike when she was hit
I agree with the sentiment but this guy quit his job to be an indie developer. This changes things a bit since he needs to now feed himself with this work.
Even beyond smartphones (I never used WebOS on a smartphone), it was amazing on the HP TouchPad. I acquired one after the fire sale and used it waaay past it's EOL. Sad that it just stopped booting one day. :-/
DirectX Raytracing is the first step toward a graphics revolution