skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This story was broke by The Daily Beast. So the person who HACKED THE DNC was dumb enough to forget to turn on his VPN and then a news outlet where Chelsea Clinton is a board member caught him? It's a totally rediculous story and likley fabricated. Unless the DNC's cybersecurity was run by literal children, the kind of sophistication needed to pull off that hack would not be by the caliber of person who would allow themselves to be traced back in the basic way this story claims. Not only that, but the original Guccifer 2.0. story was discredited many times. The documents that were released were deemed to be fake, multiple times, not just on fringe websites, but also by the MSM.

"VIPS instead surmises that, after WikiLeaks' Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016 his intention to publish Hillary Clinton-related emails, the DNC rushed to fabricate evidence that it had been hacked by Russia to defuse any potential WikiLeaks disclosures. To this end, the theory goes, the DNC used the Guccifer 2.0 online persona to release mostly harmless DNC data." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-08-10/why-some-...

Maybey this is the "insurance policy" discussed in text messages between FBI agents Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Andrew McCabe. The release of the new story has sleery timing with McCabe's firing last week.

The whole internet was talking about how Guccifer 2.0 was fake and now today they have decided it was real. Lol!
I don't think a vague sense that "they had it better" is necessarily what's at issue. The popular image of the peasant is that they must have spent most of their lives toiling away. What the historical record shows is rather different. I don't think any of us are arguing for regressing society to feudalism (well, besides [your least favorite political figure here] at least, ha ha), but looking at the disparity does give us something to interrogate -- why did we adopt the kind of hours we work now? Do they still make sense? (I think the first question is probably easier to answer than the second)
as long as you're ok with the tradeoff; convenience at the expense of safety
No, I generally agree that we've shifted things around so that most workers now are generally a bit better off than before in many ways. I think they could be better off still under alternative systems. I was however responding, primarily, to your apparent argument that anyone criticising capitalism can only be a Soviet-era state-supporting "communist".
There's a good chance that a lot of big US tech companies are going to apply the GDPR to everyone. It'd be too hard for (say) Facebook to have 2 databases.
I don’t think Google is a good example of a company that would understand the dangers involved, given how flippantly they’ve responded to government action in the past. GM I would trust more solely because at least the engineering of cars goes through strict and government-mandated testing.
I agree with much of what you said, but GM understands the stakes? Are you forgetting the GM ignition switch controversy?

I recall one of my favorite scenes from Fight Club wherein Norton talks about the cost of lawsuit*the likelihood of crash vs the cost of a recall.

I'm all about Tech companies getting into self-driving cars, less excited about car companies with shoddy track records on safety and no history of disruption. There's a reason Cruise Automation (the self driving start up that GM bought) insisted on remaining separate from GM and not being absorbed into GM's culture.

edit: spelling
I believe in the past you had to open some kind of support request, as there wasn't an "automated" way to do it (and there was maybe still some kind of waiting period after having deactivated the account). It's certainly been made easier (they've gotten a lot of flack over the years oven this...)
I think it has more to do with education. In Italy, Portugal and Greece students find themselves being overqualified for the antiquated production methods of industries in their countries, together with no investments from the government (e.g. italian 110m startup public investments against France's 60 billion)

And agricultural output in PIIGS countries having been destroyed by EU regulations, goods are literally wasted because of quotas.
> In defense of the "scorched earth approach or nothing" folks: from my perspective... it's a completely and totally human response to faceless, blameless, unapproachable (from their perspective) perpetrators and facilitators of systematic abuse and exploitation of innocent and vulnerable people.

No, its more like the Salem witch hunt.
> It doesn't matter if I were to run someone over when it's dark. I would still be accountable.

I don't know where you live, but in most legal systems I am aware of there are definitely situations where you wouldn't be responsible. If you were not impaired, driving legally and someone suddenly walks in front of your car, why would you be accountable for that?
It takes a really muddy definition of "spiritual joy" to argue that a pilgrimage to worship holy relics is the same as going to gawk at the Eiffel Tower and eat fancy food.
Precisely. There are countries, working under very similar constraints to modern day US, that are trying, and succeeding, with other arrangements.

This should be the focus of the compare and contrast because it's a valuable comparison.

I've seen a few of these, Monty Python-esque, comparisons recently. There was one in the Guardian that asserted (wildly incorrectly) that female life expectancy had decreased since the 19C.

If I was prone to paranoia, I'd be concerned that they are planted by folk that want the status quo and are making these cartoonish comparisons to make it easy to lampoon.
They probably would prefer higher wages.
'Trump says bad thing' is almost not even news anymore. You'd have to have a daily quote or something. Stick it next to the weather.
If there had been no interior video, and a regular car, the driver wouldn't be charged with anything. The prosecutor would keep the investigation open for a few months to make the woman's family happy, and then decline to file charges.

With the interior video, and the guy looking at his phone, it gets a little trickier. I think most prosecutors would let the guy twist in the wind for a few more months and then let him plead to a misdemeanor. A lot depends on the victim's family.

The problem is that the case is political and prosecutors tend to behave badly when media and publicity is involved. Hopefully the Tempe prosecutor isn't a camera hound.
For Machine Learning, provided you're actually working on the core algorithms, sure, a CS degree could help you have the requisite knowledge. But for databases and distributed systems? Domain knowledge would get you much further than what you learn from a CS degree.
GM ignition switch scandal is far more egregious than anything Google has done IMO.
The self driving technology is totally Uber, Volvo only has a partnership for cars without any self-driving gadgetry.
I'm almost certain that the footage was modified to ride the public opinion of "it's too dark to see her, so it was her fault!" even though the car should be able to operate in complete darkness thanks to LIDAR and radar sensors. Uber never plays by the rules, I wouldn't expect them to suddenly be super honest about this.
Pension account is very hard to do properly because pricing the liabilities is, well, entirely dependent on your perspective. In the UK, at least, we might consider several different measures of what that liability number is (and what the deficit is under those measures).

Buyout => What would it cost you to pay an insurer to take the liability off your hands (discount rate will basically be the replicating portfolio of government bonds).

Accounting => Depending on standard, the discount rate might just be the expected return on your portfolio

On a 30 year duration liability that could be a difference of over 200% between the different measures. Which is realistically right though?
Good (and apparently unaddressed) point. We get several more hours per day for leisure precisely because "daylight" can be continued indoors indefinitely.
I don't want to sound like a crazy person here, but could it be that the video released was edited to look super dark? The difference between the Uber video and the amateur cellphone videos is striking!

Could it be that the police//Uber employees//municipality have a political goal to make this look like it was unavoidable? It looks so to me.
I like to talk about social issues and politics and stuff but the more I do it in public the more I run into what feels like "politics-as-basketball." It's really begun to feel like team sports as opposed to a critical analysis of conditions and power analysis.
> to see if they live longer.

This is quite subtle, but whether or not people live longer is not the same as speed of ageing. Still, it could be argued that this subtlety makes the title misleading, which is also "wrong" in a way.

If metabolism is tied to speed of ageing (don't know if that is established or not) then the title would be technically correct.
As evidenced by the gerrymandered districts intended to do things like sway presidential elections. Clearly the system is working as designed and not being cheated...
Don't worry it's staying in full force in the UK as well. It's currently a massive issue for us. https://www.local.gov.uk/our-support/general-data-protection...
Low beams at high speed do not give enough advance warning to reliably prevent a collision; as your lights are turned downward, you see a pedestrian only when they're quite close.

In general, traffic safety requires that road planners ensure that one of three conditions always applies:

a) the roads are lighted from above;
b) cars are able to use high beams;
c) there are no pedestrians crossing the highway.

This can be done in general, mostly by investments in infrastructure to ensure lighting or isolated highways wherever the density doesn't allow to drive with high beams.
I would guess that usage is definitely below 1%, but it is possible to use them and I am using them from time to time without problems.
Forgoten Weapons,
British Muzzle Loaders
Cap and Ball
C&Rsenal
vbbsmyt

Good, informative, and educational channels, that will problally be banned from youtube in the future.
No, you can't tell if a given cigarette being smoked is contraband or not, but buying a pack of smuggled cigarettes is a very different experience from buying a legal pack.

When all brothels (escort services etc) are illegal, operators have very little incentive to enforce all sex workers being 18+, non-trafficed, getting regular medicals, whatever. Even a conscientious customer has very few options to check for themselves. If brothels on the other hand are legal, operators have every incentive to do this, and if anyone is looking for an illegal brothel (which looks very different from a legal one, just like the place you're buying smuggled smokes looks very different from a 7-11), this "paraphernalia" is direct evidence that they're looking for something bad.
Because I want it. It doesn't affect your life or liberty that I have it. Stop blaming guns for the actions of crazy people.
When even Google makes its own web products Chrome only, the blame shouldn't be put entirely on the web devs.
This is more an argument for better land-use policy (allowing more density), more public transportation (proven technology) and more remote work. All of these much better solve giving humans more time than self-driving cars.

Self-driving cars don't promise to save time. It's still driving. Their promise -- their only real promise -- is to save lives. And I think saving tens of thousands of American lives every year is a worthwhile goal. Worldwide, more than 1 million people die in car crashes every year. Humans have proven that they can't drive cars well, but we have put up with it because it is convenient.

I know some people will say that they could work on their way to work, but I can't do work in a car. Staring at a laptop in a car gives me motion sickness, along with a lot of other people. And, of course, this would only apply to people who do computer work in the first place.

As someone who has been in serious car crashes and lost friends to them, I for one am all for self-driving cars. It's going to be a revolution, but we shouldn't be testing them on public roads if they are this bad.
FWIW, it was one of the main stories on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 this morning, which means it reached a very large number of people. And it's linked on both the England and Politics index pages, albeit top story on neither.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Unexpected [video]
There are extensive street lights along that stretch of road. The moon isn't going to be a big factor.
> Germany's median net wealth per adult is below that of the US ($47,000 vs $56,000 for 2017). Given the US isn't renowned for how well its middle does these days, that implies something has gone wrong in Germany.

The US middle class's problem isn't that they don't have enough cash in the bank, it's that they're one firing/health issue/missed mortgage payment/... away from losing it all. Someone with $47,000 in the bank in a country with single-payer healthcare, job security, tenant security... is much better off than someone with $56,000 to their name but no social safety net.

> Excluding Norway, the best off country in terms of a combination of GDP per hour worked, least hours worked per week, and highest median net wealth is... Belgium.

I find that completely plausible, what do you think it proves? Belgium is similar to western Germany in many ways, and doesn't have the former DDR to drag its average down.
Current State of Software Transactional Memory in Python?
After a quick search of Hacker News and a Google Search, it seems that the use Software Transactional Memory (STM) in Python was popular in the early 2010s but died out in the past 3 years. What is the current state of STMs in Python? What issues did researchers face?
AZ gets dark at night. The workaround is for cars to have headlights.

Not knowing the law as it applies for (semi-)autonomous vehicle testing in Arizona, I am very curious how this one turns out.

Based on my experience driving at night (In Norway, where it also gets pretty dark), even in rural areas with no street lights, you tend to discover pedestrians -even the ones not wearing safety reflectors- significantly more than a second and a half before you cross paths with them.

So - while the vehicle is driving autonomously, there's still a driver (or whatever we should call it, seeing as they do not drive as such) behind the wheel.

If the driver had paid attention to the road, rather than her cell phone, this accident likely wouldn't have happened.

So - who is to blame, legally speaking? The 'driver' for not paying attention? The coder implementing the control algorithms? The HW engineering team deciding which sensors to use? Someone else?

This will be a lot simpler when vehicles are 'properly' autonomous - but right now, it seems AVs simply give the 'driver' all sorts of incentive for not paying attention, while still not absolving them of responsibility. That's the worst of both worlds.
Yup. I went to a school with a pretty good CS program (not quite top N) and our master's program was almost exclusively international students.
Sadly Inevitable Meta: Howdy folks, look, I appreciate the upvotes on a comment I made quickly (because I've been following this topic with some interest) but it's not nearly as content rich as some of the other top level comments around here.

That said, I appreciate a site like Arstechnica doing a great job of dissecting just how badly Uber's tech failed here, legal responsibility or not.
The existence of optional secret chats used by nobody, not implemented by apps and actively discouraged by UI, seems like a particularly shit excuse for what Telegram is doing.
Google translate is far from perfect but (except for media clips obviously) it's extremely helpful for getting the gist.
This problem is too complex to call for a single 'actual' issue. There's many issues to be solved and talked about. Technical, legal, emotional and psychological. I don't think there's need to call for one to be more 'important' than any other.
We need to solve a couple of problems first. Right now, standing up a web host correctly is difficult. Getting the settings right is troublesome, buying a domain can be expensive and hard to set up, and directing the DNS of that domain to your home's internet (where most homes, at least in the US, are dynamic addresses) is very difficult. Video hosting is a tricky experience. Delivering quickly at multiple bitrates in an easy to use interface is hard. There is a reason why YouTube, Netflix, and more spend a lot of time working on improving video quality while reducing data usage. Finally, if everyone hosts their one videos, how will discovery work?
SpaceX Put a Car in Space. Why Can't Tesla Put a Model 3 in Your Driveway? – Ext
tell him to fuck off
I'm pretty sure the multiple streetlights present on that section of the street are the main thing illuminating the road; the phase of moon is an insignificant factor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XOVxSCG8u0

I think there is a question of why didn't the optical cameras detect her. It doesn't seem poorly lit.
One requirement of EU data protection law is "informed consent", which must be freely given. Pages of legalese that we all know no-one reads, then you could say it's not informed consent.

And you have to be able to revoke consent, at any time, and it has to be as easy to revoke consent as to give consent.
That's kinda what I'm getting at: gerrymandering is the implementation. Our legislatures need to specify and clarify rules to stop those kind of abuses, but I don't think anyone is going to jail for gerrymandering a district. My point was simply that these are the rules of the game but people seem to believe someone is cheating.
I find the use of the word "scapegoat" interesting. From the little I know about anthropology, when some calamity befell the village/horde/tribe (disease/drought/crime etc) the shaman would magically point out the scapegoat as the culprit, who invariably was someone people didn't like to begin with; because of this, such decisions were rarely contested regardless of their plausibility and the scapegoat was promptly disposed of.

I suspect that most people are as clueless about what is really going on as those villagers.

Those who control the media, though, just like the shaman, are extremely adept at sizing up the public emotion.

For what it's worth, if I understand it correctly, the most interesting aspect of this is that using machine learning techniques they managed to translate the actual tags that they wanted to target (gay/square/racist/unemployed/man/rightwing/white/latino etc etc) to the less revealing tags actually offered by fb, and in this way direct propaganda more accurately.
How Social Media Changed Us
> There is only downside

Not true. There is a lot of upside if Uber is declared blameless and innocent in this accident. It could be the difference between Uber deploying self-driving taxis within a year or four. Uber hasn't shied away from this sort of "risky gambles" before. I mean, their entire business model was based on avoiding or breaking laws in multiple countries.

So don't tell me "it's very unlikely Uber did this". With Uber's track record, I'd rather believe the opposite until proven otherwise. You know the saying: "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me 7 times, and I'm the idiot". I don't like being an idiot.
One of my very first comments about self-driving cars on HN was about who's going to be liable in case of a deadly accident, and that we need to establish that very early, ideally before self-driving cars are even allowed on the road.

So far, the police seems to think "no one". I have a big problem with that. Someone should be liable for it, otherwise there will be no accountability when building self-driving systems. Even if we say "the insurance company is liable", that would still be some progress, because then we'd at least know the insurance companies would put much pressure on the self-driving car makers to prove that their systems are safe.

But I'd say it's the car maker that needs to be the most culpable party, because at the end of the day, if there are say broken brakes in a new car, which causes deaths, you don't blame the brake pad maker. You blame the car maker. They are the ones who should make sure everything works and is perfectly safe before selling the product to consumers or putting it on the road.
Thanks for the heads-up. I lost ten kilos of weight last year without trying due a mix of medication reducing my hunger and a sudden development of lactose intolerance (so "accidental fasting" I guess), and didn't particularly do any exercise. I was aware that I might lose muscle mass but hadn't considered the effects it might have on my heart.
Why is this being down-voted? This was the first thought I had. Their history as a company does suggest that they would do exactly this and try to get away with it.
> It goes back to the year 2000 when Amazon and Toys R Us signed a 10 year agreement that would make Toys R Us the exlusive vendor of toys on Amazon

If you go back a bit further, TRU had tried and failed a couple of years to do their own ecommerce. IIRC, both attempts were built on coldfusion, and both failed pretty hard. Not that it was necessarily solely CF's fault, but there were problems (probably a combination of technical and political) that prevented TRU from doing their own ecommerce. A deal with Amazon to handle your ecommerce was probably about the dumbest "short term thinking" move a company that size could make. I say it with the experience of having worked in ecommerce in 1998/99/2000 and saw behind the scenes of some pretty large operations. It wasn't pretty, but TRU could certainly have made things work on their own or outsourcing to a company like where I was working then, and it would have worked, without resorting to Amazon.
Want to Be a High-Frequency Trader? Here’s Your Chance
This might be an unpopular opinion, but are you sure you deserve twice as much equity? You're both going to be working equally hard on this startup for years.
The CEO took the risk of starting the company, came up with the idea, and raised VC funding - not trivial things to do.
I'd be dead four times over (and those are the obvious near-lethal maladies), and I just turned 50.
Maybe Apple, Carnegie Mellon, etc.

What I do know is that Uber, a company with virtually no scruples, is very far down the list of company's that I would trust to develop their own self-driving technology. It makes total sense for them to use self-driving cars to replace human drivers, but I'd feel a lot better about this if they leased it from another company.
I want to start off by saying that it was wrong of them to ask you to cancel your vacation, but in the end you threw away your vacation on the hypothetical that they would fire you, only to leave the company voluntarily. It seems like you ended up with the worst of both worlds. If you would have said no, then you'd be no worse off than you are now.
It does strike me that the free speech and capitalistic impulses of opponents of censorship are in tension with each other. If YouTube could show that hosting certain gun videos would cost them $X in advertising revenue or litigation, and that their decision to ban them was only designed to avoid that loss, would that appease their critics? Or is the suggestion here that large content platforms have some obligation to uphold free speech norms at their own expense?
Would that console you if you were run over by a self-driving car?
And working your field doesn't provide for your life? The relationship between a peasant's effectiveness at his work and the rewards he reaps is actually more, rather than less, direct than that relationship for someone stocking shelves, because if he produced more food he'd be able to keep more of it -- what was being rewarded was the result rather than the number of hours he spent in the fields.