skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All in all I'm quite impressed with the demonstration. It was way more thorough than previous videos I've seen. The main things the car is failing at from what I see are the hard things: Object permanence and ad-hoc reasoning. So no surprises.

Regarding object permanence: I was impressed overall with their detection. Still, you could see kids walking close to parents blink in and out of awareness of the car. Now I'm not saying humans are very good at tracking a multitude of actors. So at some point the machines will be "good enough". But that point seems way off when significant objects like kids can just disappear from awareness when they pass behind a stroller.

And about the ad-hoc reasoning: They have the whole city mapped out! Including traffic lights and turn restrictions. I'm not even clear whether they try to detect the signs at all. I'd assume that they have an operations center that hot-patches the map with everything cropping up during the day. So the cars would send in unexpected changes to the road and they would classify those changes and patch the map. Meaning the car is tethered to that feed and not autonomous in the strictest sense. Sure, such a center would be marginal cost given a large enough fleet. Still it's a subscription you'd need for your own robocar.

They mention a lot of things they are prepared for. And I can't help but think "oh they're really good" when they say "detect backed up lanes" or "creep into intersections". But that always leaves the question what happens when they're not prepared for something. When the rules don't fit. Can the car go over a curb if the situation warrants it? Does it back out of a blocked off section? Is it even able to weigh whether backing out is an option at this point?

so I'd like to see a "what we're currently stuck at" video. But I understand one can't very well attract investors with such a video.
Hands-on Scala Programming
Oh, I see how the title could be confusing. I should probably use a title along the lines of "Using text passwords for encryption is safe enough"?

The point I was trying to make is that reasonably long password (six simple words) makes AES encryption with key transformations almost impossible to crack. (As opposed to my intuition).

Thanks for taking the time to write the comment. It's the first time I shared my article on HN.
> I don't think "put your money where your mouth is" is a good argument. A16z can be subject to prisoner's dilemma of our collective cultural decline and simultaneously have genuine desire to get out of this predicament we're all in.

I think it's ultimately the only argument. The best way out of a prisoner's dilemma-like situation is for the central authority above the participants to resolve it unilaterally for them[0]. The next best thing is for one of the players to try and force the new equilibrium, hoping they'll be able to survive the disadvantaged position for longer than it takes the situation to reach that equilibrium[1].

Does A16z have enough money and clout to unilaterally push the market until a better equilibrium, one of "building", establishes itself? I don't know. That would be "putting your money where your mouth is", but maybe they know they can't pull it off.

I guess the next best alternative is to take it slow and do a soft push. Write pieces like these, in hopes their message will resonate with other market players. Or maybe it already does? Maybe this article is a mating call[3], a test for whether other funds think the same and will follow suit if A16z decides to put their money where their mouth is, so that everyone can stop funding bullshit software startups and start pouring money into securing a future?

--

[0] - In a prisoner's dilemma involving actual prisoners, you could have a mob boss declaim that they'll kill any prisoner that defects.

[1] - A possible example would be Tesla, which initially faced ridicule for pushing the electric cars; fast forward couple of years, and it managed to force the market to accept the viability of electric transportation, and now all major automakers want the piece of that cake. Which, from Musk's point of view, is Mission. Fucking. Accomplished. [2].

[2] - https://xkcd.com/810/

[3] - See this excellent comment that introduced me to the idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22798808. In that case, a mating call is a "publicly executed conspiracy to fix prices", but I think it can be generalized as "a method to for coordinating in cases where doing so overtly could be illegal". Which may not always be a bad thing.
In each case it may depend upon the 'application'.

For easily-understood fields undergoing well-scrutinized legal code changes it's (presumably) likely that legal drafting issues can be caught and fixed early.

Conversely, in software projects (even open source ones) where the users and authors are few and/or fail to pay attention to mistakes and errors, it could take years to report and fix issues.

All that said, in the presence of a mindful, careful and effective engineering team with responsive users, it does seem that software - or at least software processes like source control, code review and the democratized ability to contribute code changes - has an evolutionary advantage.
It really is not. Right to physical assembly is something that should be restricted in the middle of a global pandemic, since that right cannot trump the right of life of hundreds of thousands of people. Same for the right to travel. Rights such as free speech or right to private property may be broken in more extreme cases such as war.

Pretending that nuanced reality doesn't exist is the definition of "rights absolutism".
Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ Slams Virus Lockdown
Doesn't not paying make us end up rebuilding the internet again with ads and tracking? Free is not always an option.
It always comes down to censoring those you disagree with. Everyone loves free speech when it expresses views they agree with. If it's about silly edge cases, no-one really cares - the only reason to care is if it has political implications, regardless of if you are for or against suppression.
In Doctor No (the novel,) Bond does end up with a revolver, albeit not meant to be his small gun.

“There’s only one gun for that, sir,’ said Major Boothroyd stolidly. ‘Smith & Wesson Centennial Airweight. Revolver. .38 calibre. Hammerless, so it won’t catch in clothing. Overall length of six and a half inches and it only weighs thirteen ounces. To keep down the weight, the cylinder holds only five cartridges. But by the time they’re gone,’ Major Boothroyd allowed himself a wintry smile, ‘somebody’s been killed. Fires the .38 S & W Special. Very accurate cartridge indeed. With standard loading it has a muzzle velocity of eight hundred and sixty feet per second and muzzle energy of two hundred and sixty foot-pounds. There are various barrel lengths, three and a half inch, five inch…”

Excerpt From: Fleming, Ian. “Doctor No.” Penguin Books Ltd (UK), 2009-07-19T11:22:25.
It takes discipline and cerebral maturity to work at home, specially under distracting environments (e.g. Internet, games, kids).
Long commutes, long lunches, long coffees, long watercooler hours discussing movies, etc., maybe that's had to go anyway.
However, social interaction will always be key in any human endeavour, and that should not change whatsoever.
>> The lack of drainage caused unpleasant living conditions, and standing water harbored pathogens that caused numerous epidemics including typhoid fever and dysentery, which blighted Chicago six years in a row, culminating in the 1854 outbreak of cholera that killed six percent of the city’s population.

I think that's the key point right there. Action was taken only after six percent of the city was wiped out. I'm sure we could (and will) be able to do any number of things when faced with an existential crisis of that magnitude.

My hope for the present crisis is that it gives us enough pause to reflect on what we are capable of when our lives are on the line, and extend this into tackling our other social ills -- healthcare, or lack thereof, homelessness, poverty, education.
You mean something so popular did not migrate to React and Serverless yet? HOW DOES IT EVEN WORK?!!!
I agree with a significant amount of your point, but with regard to object permanence, I would guess that they have prediction algorithms that don't only rely on the current-time perception, so if something blips out of sight for a second the system will still infer/predict it's existence (for a time - obviously if something is hidden for a long time it won't continue to not trust perception).
> makes the Sweden's 8th position in the list exactly the middle

From all countries and entities in the world, around 200 here:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Sweden is currently 11th in deaths per capita, as everybody can see.

The only ones worse in the world currently are: San Marino, Belgium, Andorra, Spain, Italy, France, UK, Netherlands, Sint Maarten and Switzerland. From these, San Marino has 30K citizens, Andorra 70K, Sint Marteen 40K, so these three are practically irrelevant and misleading to compare.

So the only "real" (in size) countries in the whole world currently reported worse than Sweden are:

Belgium, Spain, Italy, France, UK, Netherlands and Switzerland.

How is that some "middle"? Note that specifically UK, Netherlands and Switzerland had longer bet on "herd immunity building, avoid other measures" than the rest of Europe. And I guess Belgium was just as incompetent as years before, having for years no government.

If anything, it is a good evidence of lockdowns working.
> But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared

This is absolutely untrue. What Americans mean about "the West" is the US and the UK. And indeed those two countries reacted absurdly and fared and will continue to fare bad. Many countries in Europe are in the same situation (including France, where I'm from).

But one country did and still does very well: Germany. One of the most urgent tasks should be to understand what they did that worked so well.
Not OP, but it's as much the algorithm having to deal with different inputs as the engineers having to build all the needed systems together.
List-Landingpage Hashes
Check out Code for America. You may already be aware of them. They're a non-profit aimed at addressing the tech gap in government and pushing for better tech solutions. They have fellowships and various positions in marketing and advocacy, not just coding.
Exactly. As it stands wealth is drained away from the people with skills to the people with quills.
Thus we end up with mountains of strangulating regs and no bullet trains or hyperloops. I remember Germany, early 2000s, same story: they had their beautiful maglev train on a test track run in a circle for 11 years. They couldn’t build it anywhere. Environmental, political, regulatory ‘uncertainty’. Finally the Chinese invited Siemens on a joint project to build a real track for Shanghai. There is still no maglev train in Germany but several in China...
2. The real question is why Graham is teaching BASIC instead of Lisp.
Google is a siren server. Read Who Owns the Future? by Lanier Jaron..

About the seo spam. It has always been like this.

The difference. Is that today. Google also wants to take over all the content you're interested in, be even more powerful, and steal the business from content creators through the short information at the top.

Basically. Yes.

Google is completely plagiarizing the entire web to improve your business returns, and yes.

Google is the one who penalizes you for creating plagiarized or copied content.

Although today. They. They are taking advantage of that very thing.

The only difference is that they give as real the content of the web pages that pay them the most.

Despite the fact that this content is stolen from another side or from your blog.

For Google it is more true / real / authentic / original, the content that offers more and more benefits to your own company.

So the internet is screwed up today. Even if you have a personal website and do not write on third party sites...
In most countries all democratic parties are allowed, but parties that plan to abolish the democratic system are not. Is this a curb on civil liberties or just a reasonable stance?
It's a writer's technique somewhat similar to method actors who take on the character's persona as their own for the duration of a play or filming. It's almost like attempting to evoke in yourself a synthetic form of dissociative identity disorder to allow a "real" personality to live and grown independently of you while you interact with and guide it towards the outcome you're hoping for.

Pretty much as far from "kill your darlings" as one can get, tbh.
Oldest gamification: pyramids competing teams with names Drunkards of Menkaure
Book links are Amazon affiliate links (tag=javamysqlanta-20)
> It's usually used by people who would like to limit freedom of speech much more than that.

Source with stats? Here's my anecdotal counter evidence: I only ever hear it used by people who don't want to limit speech except when it will cause immediate physical harm.
> If pins were numbered by columns, you would have to connect two tracks to one end of the chip and two other tracks to the other end of the chip.

You have missed my point entirely. All you have to do is re-label them. There is absolutely no re-wiring or re-routing implied by changing the pin numbers.
I also noticed that the app makes my phone run hot. For whatever reason I think it’s chewing through battery like crazy.
This page might be interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o...

It lists several cases that have been discovered of accounts editing Wikipedia for PR purposes or similar.
Exactly, when you're working at his level the resources and knowledge pool to hire people to obsess over the details. It's either a matter of ego, or he just doesn't value that sort of detail.
>Local canvasing could be far more effective than distributing online propaganda.

I tend to believe that, but are you aware of any studies that try to show that?
If you haven't read the original novels, they are an absolute treat. Very refreshing. There is great detail, but, almost never more than you absolutely need. It is used to set the pace, so, in the slower moments there will be some fluff details. Ultimately it makes for short novels, really novellas by today's standard. And frankly I love them all the more for that. It's easy to finish one in a single sitting.
'A lot of evidence' isn't one link. But let's look at that link.

"We are an anonymous group of researchers"

Well that's a good start innit (to be fair, it looks like it really is well intentioned and they are making an honest attempt but without attribution it's impossible to tell).

anyway, their summary, which you should have posted: "Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus."

It's not 'a lot of evidence' either way.
I am definitely open to the idea that the current labeling is actually more intuitive, but note that this is not at all the argument I replied to.
The article focuses on an issue that is very widespread on technical forums, and one that I find irritating. (It is a bit better here thanks to the good moderation, but you can still find examples among the comments for almost every article.)

To be specific, I mean comments
a) that point out a flaw in an argument, often on narrow technical grounds,
b) where a charitable reading of the original argument indicates that the writer would very likely have been aware of this flaw,
c) that do not provide a revised version that would be correct.

To me, such comments come off as dismissive - even insulting -, and because of this they almost never result in a good discussion.

Most often, such comments are also facile: It is easy to point out facts that hold in edge cases, but in software, as in every engineering discipline, any real world decision involves trade-offs. And as a practitioner, I find it very useful to learn how others have made trade offs on real world problems, exactly because edge cases are often not informative. Whoever comes forward to discuss their solution on such problems deserves praise, because they know that their decision is necessarily not perfect, and can be criticized. A good critique then amends the original statement to provide a better solution instead of dismissing it because it is not universally applicable.

This is not about pedantism (which is itself a highly subjective insult that never does any good) - a good comment on a minor point can be enlightening with the right context, and when respecting the original context.

I do not think this kind of destructive behavior is currently well covered by the HN guidelines, so here is a proposal of what I would add (@dang)

"If you want to point out an incorrectness in a statement, do not assume whoever made the statement was not aware of it - this often comes off as dismissive. Instead, attempt to provide a synthesis of the original statement and your criticism that would be correct from your point of view."

Using this guideline, here is how I would rephrase the examples from the article:
- "Garbage collectors work in many cases, but I have spent many hours dealing with dangling memory reference issues, so in this and that case I recommend instead..."
- "Note that TLS does not provide sufficient protection against nation state adversaries because... If you have to deal with this threat scenario, I recommend ..."
- "In performance critical scenarios, you can avoid paying the cost of bounds checking as long as you..."
Hong Kong Watch condemn mass arrests of democracy activists
RakuAST – Jonathan Worthington (Grant Proposal)
I don't get why everybody is raving about "Why Nations Fail". Their definitions of inclusive/extractive institutions seem hopelessly muddled. It is almost as if they've collected all the stuff they liked in prosperous countries and called it "inclusive" and then did the same with all the stuff they disliked in impoverished dictatorships and called it "extractive". If you try to distill a succinct definition of these concepts and then apply it, you run into contradictions such as (borrowing an example from Fukuyama): "The Indian political system is so inclusive that it can’t begin major infrastructure projects because of all the lawsuits and democratic protest, especially when compared to the extractive Chinese one."

If the thesis is "institutions are important for prosperity", it is kind of obvious. But the book does little to explain exactly what kind of institutions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22898653

940+ points
I wonder what the right time scale is here. My gut reaction is million of years?
I strongly recommend Cheers to childbirth[0] which is by far the most useful and practical book I found on what you can actually do to be a helpful partner in the leadup and during the birth. Remember you're not the priority in this situation but you do need to be a partner. Which means being a strong and empathetic advocate for what your wife and baby need. This book will help you understand what that is so you can discuss it with your wife and formulate a plan so that she can focus on getting the primary work done.

https://cheerstochildbirth.com.au
I for one, am enjoying working from home, so far. I wake up without an alarm clock. I do t have to wear what amounts to a uniform, I don't have to spend 2 - 3 hours commuting. I can get my work done.

I one of the few who default meeting to video on.

If nothing else I'm enjoying demonstrating I can be an effective worker at home.

On the other hand, I'm putting on weight. I'm not listening to as many podcasts. I'm sitting on my arse for very long periods.
well the ideal cheap ride-sharing AV world would have much more spread out cities, no?
>One of the ACLU's major recent campaigns is that trans girls should be allowed to play on girls' sports teams, for example - that's seen as an important right nowadays

Of course, that's very much a nontrivial issue even among progressive circles. Your view is far from consensual.
IT services giant Cognizant hit by ‘Maze’ ransomware
> Propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies

Who would decide what is fake news? The federal government? Perhaps a free speech Czar appointed by the president of the US? The current president of the US certainly does talk about fake news a lot. But no thanks.
That is very cool, but let me ask here: Is there a good resource, when it comes to code generation for register architectures?

I know that this would be related to instruction selection and register allocation (where at some point you map an infinite register architecture - like LLVM - to a finite real-world machine), but I never found a nice example.
And then you have Alan Moore, who takes it a step further and actually sees his characters.
Go with clojure, it's by far the most mind altering Lisp because of it's extremely nice immutable datatypes.

Common lisp by comparison, feels arcane, outdated and non lispy.
You have to learn non composable macro syntaxes, and it's often way too low level and concerned about memory and imperative code and OOP.

Scheme is nice in terms of self contained purity, but then again not as nice to use and not as mind altering as clojure.

Clojure is basically a lisp build around immutable datastructures, common lisp is a lisp build around metaprogramming, and scheme is a lisp build around lambdas.
Logo on the C64 was one of the foundational tools in my programming journey. It was part of a computing class in primary school, I think when we were 9 years old. For many in the class, this was a first opportunity to mess around with a computer (almost no one had any kind of computer at home back then).

Getting that little triangular turtle to draw the shape of my house, simply by telling it how far to move and which way to turn, ended up being a life altering moment.

I don't know if it's possible to enthrall children with it these days. The graphics must seem absolutely bland and boring compared to many things children these days get to tinker with.
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