skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my comments, I repeatedly say that individuals should not be compelled to work on military technology, except in times of war. Hardly confusing.

> In fact, reading your comments you seem to suggest that any entity (any individual even!) who has a moral objection to working on military technology, but who uses any modern technology believes themselves superior to the public. But that description describes a large minority (or perhaps a majority!) of the population.

I do not know how one could read that into my comments. At this point, I'm beginning to think you're being deliberately obtuse. Google doesn't just use this technology like you or me, it benefits, i.e., enriches itself immensely to the tune of billions of dollars every quarter! It also becomes much more powerful and further embeds itself into the lives of ordinary people in this process.

> You appear to say that Google's sense of superiority stems from its objection to working on military technology. But I think that description applies to much of the public.

I do not think that description applies to much of the public, which lives outside the SV bubble. But I will concede that this is something that's debatable.

> That is to say, I find it likely that most of the public would object to working on AI for drones. Yet you're arguing that the objection to working on AI for drones makes one believe them-self superior to the public. In other words, most of the public believes themselves to be superior to...themselves.

Here, again, you are twisting my words and ascribing meaning that simply doesn't follow from what I have said.

I am definitely saying that Google the corporation and leadership in Silicon Valley suffers from the hubris that they can simultaneously benefit (i.e., make billions of dollars) off the fruits of research that's quite explicitly geared toward military technology, and they can rebuff those very same benefactors without consequences (and while holding the moral high ground). These benefactors are Government agencies, that exist to carry out the will of the people (nominally, at least).
They're claiming that human+Autosteer+TACC is safer than a human. They're not claiming that Autopilot while you use your phone or watch a movie is safer than human driving. And they remind you of this every time you engage the feature.

Consider AEB. AEB is safety improvement on pure human driving. But it'd be hugely foolish to rely 100% on AEB to do your braking for you. It's not designed for that -- it can help you in a lot of situations, but not all of them. The same is true for Autopilot.
500-year-old Leaning Tower of Pisa mystery unveiled by engineers
Sorry but this is the corporate world. When an employee of a company speaks about an asset of that company, he represents the company views, not his ones.
This industrial approach to carbon dioxide removal is but one of several in our toolkit, and by no means the least expensive.

Project Drawdown ranks every approach in terms of tonnage of CO2 and cost. http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

These approaches get amplified by a price on carbon. If you are interested in convincing your Member of Congress to price carbon, take a look at the most effective organization doing this work: http://www.citizensclimatelobby.org
Wonder if HVDC could increase the viability of nuclear. Colorado, for example, despite plenty of space and nearby uranium mines, doesn't have nuclear- supposedly because there isn't demand for that much power!

Nuclear seems to be one of those incredibly capital intensive projects where scale is king. If you could build one site as big as you wanted, wherever you wanted, that could sell every watt of power anywhere in the country- maybe that works a lot better for nuclear.
Tesla in 'autopilot' sped up before crash that killed driver, report finds
So you've never read Asterix. You're in for a treat.
What's the fundamental task of a DBA if not "taking information, performing a transformation on it, passing it along"?
This is great, I just packed a box of ~200 old Apple ][ 5.25" floppies, and was wondering if there was ever going to be a way to see what was on them again.
Seeing as that the entire world economy for the last century, responsible for the greatest reduction in poverty in the history of the world, is driven heavily by fossil fuels, it does not seem that unreasonable.
Human social behavior is strongly based in imitation.

It's called social proof. It is a handy metric if you aren't that knowledgeable and can't judge quality directly for yourself. You look for evidence that other people judge it to be valuable.

Yes, it's manipulable. It isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But in the absence of better ways to make such decisions, it beats having nothing to base it on.

That's not to be argumentative per se. Just elaborating on why it gets done that way.
There is no argument made, it's a comic strip.
I don't know about that. Fortran is no less abstracted from hardware than any other programming language (including Python).
> This is a bit dramatic though because these robots can't reload themselves.

Neither can mines, and look at the decades of devastation those have caused. Now imagine a minefield where the mines get up and chase after you.
No matter what, the marketing use of the word "autopilot" is complete negligence. Why Tesla isn't being sued out of existence is beyond my reckoning. The liability here is enormous.
>-Is pursuing an AI that kills 10 bad guys but saves 20 good ones overall bad?

It's irrelevant. The swordsmith doesn't get to choose who gets cut down.

Does anyone think it's possible to build autonomous weapons that can't be turned upon arbitrarily chosen populations?
Shitty OSes, naff late to the party phones and music players, convicted monopolists, tend to have arseholes running the company and are now paying 7 billion dollars to buy a company purely for the reputation, and it's people who are leaving GitHub who are not rational?
An autonomous car must decide at every moment whether to brake, accelerate, swerve left, swerve right, or do nothing. Otherwise the car is not very autonomous. :)

If it senses an unavoidable collusion ahead, it will need to choose from possible reactions that each have different consequences for the various people and property. Someone has to program or train the car what to value when choosing its reaction. The car will be biased, implicitly or explicitly, by the programmer's values.
Also, Shenzhen isn’t much cheaper either (at least to buy, rents are much more reasonable of course).
"Why do they think they are kings of the world if they are on the lowest chain in the tech world? "

They haven't gone through a downturn like 2002. Until then I thought I am the king of the world. Then I quickly realized that I am not as smart and self-made as I thought.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258492

220+ points
You should reconsider your mental model of the law. With respect, it’s misinformed.

Law in its writing and interpretation is less deterministic, and quantity of statute is far less of a factor in its complexity than most in STEM realise.

Further, to parse law in a sense that it could be sensibly refactored, would be impossible with AI/ML as the field stands today, and I think will never be possible.
The software you speak of is incredibly simplistic, though. Engine management is literally a table of data that matches inputs with what to do. It is not sophisticated software.
I think the GP poster understood that much; what they were objecting to was the idea that there’s any point in changing who can see a post, after it’s already been sitting around for hours/days under the wrong ACL and has already ended up being shown in everyone’s timelines et al.
> If coal sunsets, America needs to make a promise that we're going to do right by miners. In a bigger, more sustained way than recent token retraining efforts. Something on WPA / TVA scale.

One of the major 2016 Presidential candidates had a plan to help them [1]. The miners overwhelmingly voted for the other candidate.

[1] http://static.politico.com/b8/90/cbbc9c59413089d87e8d6340f13...
Right, I mean it can't continue at that rate forever - the numbers don't support that hypothesis.
Sure, but there are way more of us so the harm is far larger. Coal currently kills about a million people a year worldwide, and thousands in the US.

And I don’t even want them to become destitute! I just want to help them move on to a better job. Meanwhile they apparently don’t care that they’re dumping poison into the air. Why should I tolerate that?
Seriously ? so instead of taking x amount of time it will take x amount of time + a few years.
I think that will largely depend on how we define the ROI.

> Also, did you just use technical debt as a metaphor for regular old debt?

Hahahaha, good catch. I just might have.
If I had to guess, overly aggressive safety regulation adds about 50% to the cost. A lot of the cost is actually just in concrete (it is amazing how much concrete a nuclear plant uses), and concrete costs wouldn't have come down with volume.

Even if you relaxed the safety regulations, natural gas has an edge with fracking.
Softwareheritage.org, UNESCO and Inria Open the Archive of the Digital Age
dabbler's HN comment a few below yours has a link to them.

https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/4167#issuecomment-3...
> My experience, both hiring and being hired, is the opposite.

Same.

> I have always had my own desk.

Outside of your headphones on at your desk, you still need to be more social during work hours than it used to be (30 years ago). Meetings are a thing, standups are a thing. Having your own desk doesn't preclude this. What he means by "introvert" is an important question.
That sounds like a great way to stall all further progress, which has a horrific human cost of its own.

Government has a valid role to play, though, by requiring full disclosure of the contents of updates and "improvements," by setting and enforcing minimum requirements for various levels of vehicle autonomy, and by mandating and enforcing uniform highway marking standards. Local DOTs are a big part of the problem.
Eventually, yes. One nice thing about the US natural gas boom is that power plants for natural gas have much lower capital costs than coal plants, so there will be less screaming when they are eventually shut down.
“Car firmware shouldn’t be open source, that’s dangerous.”

There’s no way in hell Tesla would have gotten away with selling this for so long if their users were allowed to read the unobfuscated source.

The fact that people are given no control over these things that can kill them while the manufacturers can just mess around with it without any real oversight is absolutely insane. I really don’t think the average IRC lurker who could figure out how to compile the firmware could be any more dangerous than the “engineers” who wrote it in the first place.
You hit the nail on the head.
To be fair, the fact that children have undergone a drastic fall in sleep time is not a good thing, and arguably, we can see that from evolutionary reasoning. But yes, I do agree with you that applying such arguments to humans is dangerous territory.

My thinking is that evolutionary arguments should be somewhat trustworthy concerning humans and sleep because there's no evidence that we've found anything to replace sleep in humans. I think that the idea that caffeine could be an effective replacement for sleep silly because caffeine is something animals would have evolved to secrete if it was beneficial for them to do so.

That said, if we found an intervention that significantly increases people's sleep quality and efficiency or to mimic all the benefits of sleep in waking humans then yes evolutionary arguments about humans and sleep go out the window.
The trend from public to private blockchains
> bounds checking

Wouldn't this incur a performance penalty?

> (unlike C)

C is also strict in this respect.
An Update on the Audience Selector Error
It's a glib dismissal of the all to common and toxic view that requiring any level of ability is gate keeping, counterpoised against the view that some areas require a level of gate keeping that is not found outside of right wing dictatorships.

The juxtaposition of the two should make anyone on the fence of the validity of either claim think more deeply about them, while throw those who don't into a tailspin where they can't even understand what is being said.
Rakuten acquires mobile commerce startup Curbside
reminds me of the joke

>"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a NukeChicago procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a NukeCity procedure, to which Chicago could be given as a parameter."
Good to hear.

> If you really don't want to raise money from outsiders, just don't raise money.

This sounds like it’s perpetuating a false binary between VC and bootstrapping. This probably works in VC‘s favor, but not individual founders’ (on average).

PS - Basecamp is another ex of a tech co that raised money from non-VC investor(s) (Bezos) who got dividends—not a payday on an exit.
Very true, could you imagine the political implications if the Trump organization DID reject the Chinese investment into an Indonesian state project? If acceptance of money is, ipso facto, a sign of political corruption, then would blocking the exchange of money between 2 sovereign nations be considered meddling in foreign economies? What intentions could be read from an act of rejection? How much of the invested money would have actually reached the Trump organization? The Trump organization is far too tied to the Trump presidency for comfort. But this has been true of the Clinton foundation during Bill and Barack's terms as well.

As an aside, the president should first and foremost, represent the nation's best interests. But I can't determine what Trump holds in higher regard, the office of the president, or himself. I imagine most people think being president of the US would be the highest position in the world. For any politician at least, US or foreign, the top of their food chain is the US President. But how does a billionaire like Bezos, with a business and news-media empire, view being president? Does someone like that look down or up? What I mean is, would and should a billionaire 'play' president the same way a politician would 'play' president? My imagination is that a billionaire would want to become president in order to use the office to accomplish political goals not possible simply with money, versus a career politician who might simply see the US Presidency as a goal in itself. At the end of the day, both want to see their desired outcomes come to fruition, both want to be in a position of governmental power to make their wants happen. Which one is better for the nation?
Baby don't hurt me...
Tesla reminds you to pay attention and keep your hands on the wheel every time you engage Autopilot. It's one of very few legal disclaimers they show you all the time on the screen, and don't give you any way of turning it off.
It is amazing how long one can go on listing new, exciting ways one's body begins to fail when sleep deprived.
The GNU Community
I'm extremely tired today, so I am probably not making my points as eloquently as I would like. Although this is a new account, I've participated on HN nearly 9 years and some folks are well aware of that. I get recognized as also being that other handle by a surprising number of people. I have long addressed controversial issues like suicide. That isn't anything new.

Today is my birthday. I am trying to tongue-in-cheek look upon the down votes as HN's birthday gift to me.;-)
If you spend decades being a better juggler you won't be a better programmer, the same is true for all the meta-programming jobs.
First - your new business sounds like a(nother) winner to me.

Your pushback = really good point. Personally, I wouldn't recommend that anyone tries to raise $25-$50k, as their odds of hurting a really good relationship will be at about 99%...but I understand what you're saying.

My advice is that if you are thinking about raising under $500k, or only raising money from family and friends, just go through the struggle as a bootstrapper. You'll learn a lot more and probably get further than you would with the friends and family money. Plus you'll still have a place to crash and be welcomed to a warm meal from time to time, if needed.

Of course I say this as someone who was never able to raise capital. So, my bias is what it is. I'm a bootstrapper. Good luck, Rand - wishing you the best!
Facebook's response https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/audience-selector-error...
Those have very different skill domains, workdays, future trajectories.
Musk's systems are more A than I.
> the big oil companies and the massive political machine that supports them drops the whole "global warming isn't real" line

They dropped that a few years ago

https://www.shell.co.uk/sustainability/environment/climate-c...

http://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/current-issues/climate-po...

https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability/climat...

Although... https://www.citgo.com/NewsViews/CITGOViews/GlobalWarming.jsp
You Probably Don't Need Derived State
Ironically, Gogs is hosted on GitHub :)
Wait what? Which BSD? Which bootloader? Which Fortran? I would be pleasantly astounded if this was true.
I've lived there a few years. Move around more now.
Like all adaptive cruise controls, it will accelerate if you have the max speed set higher, but it will not ram into things since it's on you to steer.
More on Postgres Trigger Performance
I wonder which other groups of people the Guardian would feel comfortable writing headlines about promoting killing for the good of the world.
If the crux of your plan is, "We're going to lie to the federal government about what we're doing, and hope that we're small enough that no one notices," you've got a pretty big flaw in your plan.
There is definitely an argument made. It might not be in the form that you're looking for, but the argument is there. The graph clearly points to a high correlation between the industrial revolution and a fast and huge (relative to other changes) rise in temperatures. How is this not an argument?
> I'm... not so certain. Why?

In this specific case, because if a driver is watching the road in front of them, four seconds is an awful lot of time to watch yourself head toward and then accelerate into a cement barrier, all without touching the brakes. It's fine to want Autopilot to be better, but as a matter of law, it is the driver's responsibility to slam on the brakes in that situation, and move into a legal lane.

More broadly, it's because the contract of an L2 system is that a human is in control at all times. L2 systems are assistive and not autonomous. They will never disobey a driver's presets, nor override a driver's real-time inputs, even if the car thinks it is safe(r) to do so. This is a major design principle behind every L2 system, and the reason why there are no scenarios where an L2 system is considered at fault by law.

Now obviously, if there were a bug that caused an L2 system to override a user's input -- say disregarding someone hitting the brakes, or overpowering the steering wheel, that'd be a systemic failure and grounds for a recall. But we haven't seen any cases of that, and there are hardware precautions (e.g. limited torque in the Autosteer servo) to minimize that possibility.
The thing is, in previous positions we've used the cloud plenty, and it's been fine. But for what I'm doing now? No way. Just not the right fit. I therefore become extremely sceptical when people cite $unspecified_but_awesome_gains from switching.
Part 1 of the blog post here: https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/are-triggers-really-t...
Pulled like banned or reduced budgets? No. If anything there are some small campaigns we normally wouldn't work for (to small) that are against deadlines but didn't get their FB paperwork done (new rules for political ad buying)
I don't know how not raising money from VCs works in VCs favor, but I'm open to listening.
Its the defeat of democracy by exaustion.
If you marshall copyright rewrite laws every half year, the organizations who ralley to protests to prevent or repent those laws are going to admit defeat by exaustion.

We need a law, that prevents significant changes to a topic after it has been created for at least 4 years. Precising and edge case ammendments - yes, but direction/ intentionwise, the law remains locked in place for one voting period.
How about distributed systems like Mastodon or Blockchain or IPFS? They might not even be able to comply with GDPR.
You don't give people credit for what should be normal. You give them credit for doing something over and beyond normal.
I wouldn't think of bad press is "just heckling." A company's reputation can be worth billions in sales.

It's true that many boycotts fizzle out, though.
Cant we automate that- just like they automated copyright law rewrites in those media companies.

You can not ralley succesfull protests year after year.
Sure, there's engineering issues on Mars, but the longest-lasting device anyone's put on the surface of Venus lasted only a couple hours.

Neither are exactly prime vacation spots, but if you want a target for robotic exploration, Mars is so much easier.
Most unikernels are a kernel specifically packaged for a certain application, so the answer would be no.
>There’s a huge positive-feedback-loop problem in technology right now that needs to be solved to make projects viable.

As others have said in this thread, it is not specific to technology.

Other words to describe it: Hipsters, teenager-(like)-wannabe-with-the-"in"-crowd-mentality (I see that a lot in adults), winner-take-all, network effects, (going back) "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" (or insert other popular bigco name here), ... , all the way back to the fundamental point - human nature.

Not very many people are discerning and try to make independent judgments/decisions. Much easier to follow the crowd or herd.
ZERO MOTORCYCLES – The Electric Motorcycle Company – Official Site
I believe there is a JEP to fix that, but it doesn't say if it will make JDK 11.

http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/8200758
It's also common to have a debugging interface over network that you can use to inspect program state

Except in unikernels that have proudly eliminated the network stack.
Feedstock for plastics and other industrial products.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=34&t=6

A similar process used in:

https://availabletechnologies.pnnl.gov/technology.asp?id=395

...could be used to reform lower value hydrocarbons into higher value ones.