skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My assumption here is that when we have driverless cars, they wont be purchased by individuals but a few global providers will emerge that will provide those cars as a service (similar to how we only have few rental car companies, or how ZipCar is a leader in its field or how Uber is becoming a single provider of taxi-like service).

In that scenario, both the cost of cars and cost of energy (gas or electric) will have direct negative impact on their revenues so they will have a very strong economic incentive to drive down that cost.

A single buyer isn't well informed and isn't very rational, so a nice shape of the car might be more important than mpg mileage. Our hypothetical provider would, however, consider it one of the most important characteristics.

Combine that with a great purchasing power of such provider. If they buy 10000 cars and they want high mpg, you can be sure that car companies will spend most of their effort on increasing mpg.
Electric cars might not become the norm for another decade. The technology is still nascent and it will improve significantly over the next decade.

Also, why would you want to restrict an improvement that could benefit gas powered cars too? A self-driving car would probably be more efficient than a human driver. Fewer traffic jams would be less wasted fuel.
The caching that MySQL does effectively useless unless all of your queries deserve equal priority (times their individual footprint) for memory. That's almost never the case. I don't want relatively low-impact-rare-reads to take up space that I'd prefer to use for high-impact-common-reads, for instance.

It's nice that MySQL caches queries, but it doesn't solve the same problem that an application-level cache does.
Zero. The 2.8 to 2.9 upgrade took exactly one extra build cycle, which we had already committed other code to test anyways.
There goes one of the greatest game-designer of our time. I remember his talk from E3 this year, where he - between the lines - criticized most of the modern game-design. Some of the points he made:

- Gameplay is everything. Games are about gameplay, don't turn games into movies. I think the Mario & Zelda series show this rather well.

- Always change something in a sequel. This was one of his strongest points, if you look at Nintendo, all they do is sequels of their existing IPs, but unlike - say Assassins Creed cough - they always make sure it's never just more of the same.
Rumor: Amazon Retail Stores Coming & Predatory Pricing Channel Destruction
A TLD does not need an MX record to receive mail. If the MX record does not exist, it will use the A record instead.
I don't think it's really about being noble. When money is involved you don't know who is going to take offense with what you say. People with money or opportunity may not like the concept of you airing their or other people's "dirty laundry". It's also hard to verify information & a whistleblower can just as easily be painted as a hater/whiner or someone who has ulterior motives.

So shady people or companies continue to be shady because people don't want to risk loss of potential income or reputation.
This is a far down the road vision. It calls for a huge shift in the mindset of the consumer AND the manufacturer, to say nothing of the society. Then there is the infrastructure and error handling - what happens when it gets a flat tire on its way to pick up the kids after dropping you off?

Lets give it 15 years. 15 years is a long time for technology but not so much for societal evolution.

I can see the driverless car being on the road in 5 years and I see it being used for carpools. But the vision as painted in the post? Yes, I'm a skeptic.

Very interesting stuff though...I can't wait till they hit the road.
It seems that to most Americans, the draw of the driverless car won't be "hey, this is more efficient and is costing me less overall." Rather, I think it will be, "hey I don't have to pay attention in the car anymore, I'll be on my phone playing on the internet the entire way home!!!!!!!" Followed shortly thereafter by, "hey why doesn't this car have the internet in the front seat?"
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, Americans spend more than 500 million 'commuter hours' per week in their automobiles. Once driverless cars take over this time can be spent on browsing web (clicking ads)
It's interesting that First Officer Bonin is able to doom the plane by continuing to hold back on his joystick, even when that action isn't having positive results. Had the other first officer pushed his joystick forward, would the plane begin to dive? I assume that one joystick has precedence over the other...

It seems dangerous to have two joysticks, both capable of controlling the plane, that have no physical or simulated physical link. It means that one pilot could be attempting to control the plane and his actions will have no effect whatsoever if the other seat is panicking (as in this case).

Anyone have any insight into this?
As hard as it might be, it's a solved problem. FedEx is doing it. Uber is doing it. And I'm sure there are plenty of others out there, I just don't know about other industries.
A lot of credit for the transition in priority goes to Melinda Gates, according to Bill on an interview on Charlie Rose Show w/ Bill, Melinda & Warren Buffet if I remember correctly.
> Not quite. You can render the z value to a texture, but that is done in the pixelshader and do not touch the hardware z-buffer used for z-fail/z-pass tests. It is this hardware z-buffer that is inaccessible, as it shares it memory with the stencil buffer which is used for stencil tests. Hence the proprietary format.

This was true for Direct3D 9 but 10+ allow you to bind the depth/stencil buffer as a texture, although there is the caveat that you can't have it simultaneously bound as a texture and as a render target.

See "Reading the Depth-Stencil Buffer as a Texture" on this page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb20...
Chinese Students and Fitting In
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Oh boy that's a misleading headline, as he is still going to be working at Nintendo.

He's stepping down from major title development (Think mainline Mario, Zelda) and will be downshifting to working on small titles with a small team.

“What I really want to do is be in the forefront of game development once again myself,” Miyamoto said. “Probably working on a smaller project with even younger developers. Or I might be interested in making something that I can make myself, by myself. Something really small.”
Techies forget how something as trivial as downloading and running a file can be a huge deal for the average user.

I learned today that one of my friends (up until this past summer) thought that the internet was something on her computer.

I hold this person in high regard as one of the most intelligent people I know, she just doesn't know computers.
The energy used to make a car is dwarfed by the energy it uses on the road over its lifetime.
For comparison, the best I have measured with a 3G technology (HSDPA) was 10 Mbps down, while downloading from kernel.org on my laptop, tethered to my phone over wifi, in a sparsely populated area covered by a strong HSDPA signal.
XSS Vulnerability in Google Code site
so... why didn't they leave when asked too? They had plenty of opportunity over the last couple weeks to obey the law.

why do they think they have the right to deny access to people who don't want to be involved with the OWS people?

why do they think they have the right to tear up a public space?

why do they think they don't have to obey the laws?

why do you support these do nothing idiots?
Articles (including Ilya's) are frequently submitted by authors to http://rubyflow.com/
With shared resources, this might not be the case.

Today, car owners have already spent $x on their cars -- so they have an incentive to use their investment to the fullest.

Compare that with a shared-car system like ZipCar. ZipCar is generally much more efficient than owning a vehicle (if you don't use it to commute) -- however, since you pay per hour, you have an incentive to skip the car when it's not necessary.

By removing the sunk-costs of ownership, you could incentivize conservation rather than consumption.
I wish he would also support LFTR thorium reactors so that if this doesn't work as well as expected, there's a plan B for cheap and safe nuclear power.
R,ggplot2: Engineering Data Analysis Talk at Google
> The question is can you get reliable edge detection with less number of texture look-ups on the z-buffer versus the RBG based edge detection?

The way it's working in my mind has about the same number of lookups as FXAA, but I'm honestly not sure how that'd pan out in practice. We'll see.

> As far as I'm aware, all modern graphics cards allow you to render the depth buffer to texture just like the color buffer.
Not quite. You can render the z value to a texture, but that is done in the pixelshader and do not touch the hardware z-buffer used for z-fail/z-pass tests. It is this hardware z-buffer that is inaccessible, as it shares it memory with the stencil buffer which is used for stencil tests. Hence the proprietary format.

No need for the internal format, though -- raw depth buffers are A-OK.

> As you can see, the bit depth restriction means that you would end up with 2x bandwidth usage with the z based edge detector, especially on the older hardware where you do not have the bandwidth to spare. It would be a different case if you can sample the hardware z-buffer.

One thing to keep in mind is that yes, you're rendering it to texture and you incur some overhead there, but you don't have to pull that data back to the CPU so you're dependent on bandwidth between the GPU and its memory, not main memory. Sure, it's double the memory used there, but that's negligible from a bandwidth perspective. Also a good thing to note that you generally already have your depth buffer if you're doing deferred rendering, and you can do all the AA based on that, in theory.
Android 4.0 on the Kindle Fire
The lack of reaction to "Stall!" implies one of two things; either it was broken and the sound didn't play or the complete lack of understanding about what the word "Stall" meant with the pilots. Has either of these been proposed and discussed? The author of this piece doesn't seem to touch on why they ignore "Stall!", unless it's been confirmed the sound had been heard (on the recording maybe?) and they did indeed understand what "Stall" meant as it's "standard" pilot language?

Why would they ignore it...
According to the article, the input from the two joysticks is averaged.
Aren't you making a Luddite argument?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Different jobs will take their place. There are a lot fewer farmers these days, for example. The real trick is to find effective ways for people to get the training.
I'm actually surprised at how resilient the cell phone networks are. For something that is so heavily used I would expect it to go down more often.

Or maybe my definition of going down is different than others. There are plenty of bugs all the time (dropped calls, misdialed numbers, etc). I'm not convinced that whenever I dial a number and someone else picks up and says wrong number that I did indeed dial the wrong number.

Ghost in the shell I tell you.
I brought this up in Matt Maroon's post about the topic back in January, and he brought up a good point: People like to own their car because it's a moving storage locker.

http://mattmaroon.com/2011/01/03/google-will-become-an-ai-co...
Client-Side Adaptive Images For Responsive Designs
But people tend to live in the suburbs and work downtown; so the net traffic in one direction is much greater than the net traffic in the other direction.
The articles says it's audible on the recording. Stall alarms are usually very loud. I can't speak for Air France, but in general aviation the word "stall" (in English) is of global significance.

I imagine they thought it was malfunctioning, or simply didn't think about it in the heat of the moment.
I don't know about that, I find Ubuntu to be far worse in this department. I blame their strict release schedule (April and October). Ubuntu LTS releases seem totally half-baked, with changes half working, and totally undocumented. Desktop users probably don't notice these things, but to a sysadmin their undocumented changes to things like motd and init are frustrating.
It's Miyimoto's quote that's misleading if anything. I don't think the headline is intentionally baiting. No more Zelda by Miyamotao? Pretty big deal.
Formerly developed at all MS shops, now at Amazon mostly doing Java with a Linux workstation. Oh words can't describe how I miss Visual Studio and responsiveness of Windows 7.
LIVE: IMVU VP Reveals How They Experimented Their Way to Startup Success
Very misleading indeed.

But, honestly, I think his shift to smaller games/teams could be for the best. It's hard to guess how much influence he had anymore when "producing" titles. But working on small games might allow his creativity to flourish like it did when he first started.
You're going to increase your fuel bills dramatically driving ack and forth like that.
> It's not striking down a law, but you can see the process at work most clearly in Bush v. Gore. It was, on the face of it, a horrible decision, and the court itself said it shouldn't be used for any precedent; it's not been cited once since then

Bush v. Gore is like a once in history Constitutional crisis. It's not representative.
The author did touch on it:

"According to Camilleri, not one of US Airway's 17 Airbus 330s has ever been in alternate law. Therefore, Bonin may have assumed that the stall warning was spurious because he didn't realize that the plane could remove its own restrictions against stalling and, indeed, had done so."
New music video of Michael Jackson's Earth Song by Nemo Shaw
> This was true for Direct3D 9 but 10+ allow you to bind the depth/stencil buffer as a texture, although there is the caveat that you can't have it simultaneously bound as a texture and as a render target.

Missed that one as I have been mostly playing around in DX9 and only a bit of DX10.

There is the case of the billboarded or partly transparent texture. The z-based edge methods will not work in these cases as you render them with z-write off. Meaning, atleast in those cases, FXAA is a clear winner over both MSAA and z-based edge detection.
We're in the software business. Putting people out of jobs is what we do. Pretty much any technological advancement puts people out of jobs. But it's okay! There are more productive things they can be doing. That's kind of the whole point!
I present to you print-object, a generic function in Common Lisp.

http://clhs.lisp.se/Body/f_pr_obj.htm

So say you have a object type FOO, you can do this:

(defmethod print-object ((obj FOO) stream)
...)

Now, when you have a FOO on the repl, print-object will be called.

Obviously it doesn't provide a drilldown approach and any number of nifty and useful functions.
Can anyone explain the virtues of asynchronous and dual input modes? Why would it average the inputs?

Why would it not give the co-pilot feedback? Is it because instinctual resistance to yoke feedback would result in imprecise inputs during manual maneuvers?
Why wouldn't driverless cars be purchased by individuals?

I want one and I have money - when they're available, why wouldn't I be able to buy one?

Are you suggesting that I won't want to? I'm skeptical - the convenience of being able to use something whenever I want trumps cost. Or are you suggesting that I won't be able to?
"True change in this area really is something where the Court can only do so much. The definitions of patents in general are determined by Congress and its laws."

Sorry, but this is just completely wrong. The law regarding patentable subject matter is almost entirely judge-made. There are broad categories of inventions in software, medicine, business methods, and elsewhere that clearly were not eligible for patent protection in 1980 and are eligible for patent protection under recent court decisions. This didn't change because Congress passed new legislation. It changed because the courts (primarily the Federal Circuit) changed its mind. Given that fact, it makes sense to criticize the courts for continuing to expand the bounds of patentable subject matter, no?
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Airbus' have priority override button which will allow the pilot not flying (PNF) to take command of the aircraft. In hydraulic or "direct" flight controls, both sticks move at the same rate, you need to be stronger than the other pilot. Normally the autopilot and flight control system would have the authority to override the pilot actions (common on A320 etc.) but not all planes have that feature.

In addtion, if the autopilot or flight control system goes from a fully 'in the loop' mode to a 'direct mode' where input=output (the transition possibly being caused by faulty airpseed sensors in this case), the automatic flight control mode has no more authority to interrupt pilot command.

In situations like you describe where two 'free' (no force feedback in relation to control surface force) joystics are used, it is better to have a 'pilot in control' switch otherwise you could get situations where an inexperienced pilot would panic and force his joystick to an unsafe position, overriding the more experienced pilot.

See the following link for more info:
http://msquair.wordpress.com/2011/09/16/pilots-in-the-loop-a...
Masonry dynamic grid layout decoupled from jQuery
They don't explicitly state that it is something you can hear in the recording, I made the assumption that the "blackbox" contain not just an audio recording but a log of the computer system -- what actions it took, which is how they know the co-pilot was pulling back the entire time -- and they're basing it off of that. Although the way they phrase it (reading back through the relevant paragraphs now) with the assumption he is referring to it being audible it does read that way. I'll email the author to ask for clarification.
My mutt & Gmail setup
Critical Zero-day Vulnerability in Adobe Reader
If you are going to analyze all pixels on the screen, it would be better to use some kind of median filter[1].

It looks smoother and more focused: http://i.imgur.com/hsq84.jpg

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_filter
I think the legal issues are underestimated here.

Who is liable if your driverless Civic drives you into a tree? What if it runs over a pedestrian? Honda? Google? You?

Driverless cars could dramatically reduce the dangers of driving, but it's a lot more complicated if a machine learning algorithm kills somebody than if a mistaken human being does.
The Importance of Website Performance (Sources)
Which raises a very good question, when would you ever want that joystick behaviour?
So the effect of a driverless car is going to be a driverless taxi. Why doesn't everyone use a taxi now? I'm sure it would cost less than cars do. But nobody really does the cost-benefit analysis of these sorts of things.
According to the wikipedia article, if we decide that the decide that increased energy (or road space etc.) use is a bad thing we can fix Jevon's paradox with taxation on car use.
Livingsocial raises $176million
If we have self driving cars why wouldn't we have self driving public transport?
Since it's at mint.com/accounting I wonder if it an intentional dig at the traditional concept of accounting, or at least personal finance, as opposed to what mint offers?

Just a thought.
"And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold."

Incorrect conclusion. Cars being used 20 times more will break down 20 times faster. Less might be needed on the road at the same time but they'll break down and need to be replaced at a much faster rate. Over a serval year timeframe the amount of cars turned over will remain roughly the same.

I also wouldn't send my car home to pick up my wife and drive her to work because my fuel bills will skyrocket through all the extra driving around.

The shared resource makes sense. It'll be similar to taxi services that exist now. You call for a driver and the closest shared car will come to pick you up.
by "ignore" I mean they didn't acknowledge it, they didn't once mention the obnoxious noise and the implications. Even if they believe that they could not stall the plane, would they not mention it as something to consider? Looking back on the account of events through the entire thing from start to finish was little more than 5 minutes, so maybe they didn't have time in the panic to mention it, but it still seems strange to me that at no point did someone ever say "it's stalling!", even when the captain returned he didn't acknowledge either, which just seems so strange.

"We still have the engines! What the hell is happening? I don't understand what's happening." unless this is in reference to the stalling?
Salman Khan spotted on the sets of Ek Tha Tiger
Assuming usage does not go from 4% to 96% and he is only partially right, will there still be no interesting societal transformations along his outline due to an increase to, say, 50%?
Looks like one issue might be that all the instruments show what the aircraft is doing and what is happening outside, but it doesn't show what the pilots are doing. When we design interfaces, we of course assume the user is aware of their own actions and embodied state. But I guess when there are multiple users we need to help them be able to sense the actions/state of others.

Linking the two sticks is one way, another might be to show the state of the two sticks on the display next to the indicator of pitch, perhaps using coloring to highlight when the sticks are being pushed forward or backward. But of course there is already an overload of indicators. Really, improvements in the software/AI might be the best solution.
The point here is that very efficient driverless cars may encourage more travel than driver cars do. The increase in total miles travelled may more than offset the savings for any given passenger mile.

The key to the Jevons paradox is that first order estimates of the effects of efficiency are misleading. You must also give regard to how the increased efficiency will change buyer preferences.
"Always change something in a sequel. This was one of his strongest points, if you look at Nintendo, all they do is sequels of their existing IPs, but unlike - say Assassins Creed cough - they always make sure it's never just more of the same."

While I love the games and the series, I think there is a decent case for Zelda games being "more of the same" (at least in regards to the 3D versions, not including the latest which I haven't played yet). Aside from Wind Waker, the 3D Zelda games were fairly similar. I guess Majora's Mask had the timer, but by slowing down time it was essentially a non-factor. I mean there were definitely differences, but the game was basically complete several temples while choosing between various forms (each with pros and cons) and using the same basic subset of weapons (arrows, sword, hookshot), building up to a final series of trials at the end where you have to use all the skills you learned to complete it.
Indeed, I think he's basically maneuvered himself into an even better position, creatively: he still has all the resources of Nintendo at his disposal, but now will have none of the requirements or expectations to produce huge, sprawling, guaranteed multi-million-dollar-franchise-continuing titles.
Computers that communicate could draft really well at highway speeds, and get awesome MPG. They also would rarely need to brake.
I was thinking of ". . .even though the word "Stall!" will blare through the cockpit 75 times." Looking back over it, I suppose that's not quite what that means. . .
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Relevant and prescient: http://xkcd.com/137/
This would force people to carpool :)
Curious case of LinkedIn