skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A couple of comments:

And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold

Actually, no it wouldn't. If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now. That means cars will have to be replaced much more frequently. There would be fewer cars sold than there are now, but it wouldn't be 20x fewer.

The operating percent of a car will go from 4% to that 96%

This seems wildly optimistic to me. The driverless cars may be capable of driving around 96% of the time, but that doesn't mean they can be carrying people 96% of the time. No matter how efficient the system, if there are enough cars to handle peak traffic during the day, then a lot of those cars will be sitting around doing nothing at night.
Replied earlier but it was eaten...

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You want to keep the expertise on your product IN-THE-COMPANY, not outside.
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Much of the 'expertise' I run in to is another word for undocumented knowledge. When someone leaves - employee or contractor - stuff leaves with them.

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You want to be able to build a company engineering culture, to be able to adapt.
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Having written documented processes will help all people be able to get up to speed much faster - employees and contractors - and 'adapt' more easily to changing needs.

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You want people which have a stake in the actual outcome of the company.
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Give me some written profit-sharing agreements, open books, and the ability to veto bone-headed decisions by people above me and/or in other departments. Outside of that, what "stake" do you really have in your company?

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You don't want your programmers only be a contract away from working for your competitor.
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Non-competes. Not valid in all areas, but possibly more enforceable against contractors or small shops than employees. IANAL, of course, but full-time employees are also just a phone-call away from working for your competitors too.

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Also: you don't want all the contracting engineering, communicating and legal overhead.
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Yeah the 'overhead' of communication with people is too much. Better to just have FTEs and leave them in the dark. ???

Lastly, none of what I'd initially written was posited as an "either/or". Digg's problem was they made too many hires, then were overstaffed when the nature of their problems changed. Strategic hires and contract relationships would have been much smarter, and this is something I say certainly in hindsight with Digg, but had they asked in 2007, I'd have said the same thing.
Endeca and The Butterfly Effect
> other people made those decisions decades ago.

This isn't decades ago, and Ubuntu is not Unix. It is Ubuntu. Decisions made decades ago for Unix are not inherently right, and have no special moral authority.

> I couldn't care less about ubuntu, I'm not using it.

Then perhaps you shouldn't speak on the subject. /etc/motd is the least of the things they've "messed with".

Trying to treat a modern operating system as if it's a 1970s operating system is absurd.

> Down that path lies SuSE linux.

There is nothing inherently wrong with SuSE. I don't happen to use it, but there are a lot of things I don't happen to use.

You're stuck in the past. A Unix-centric past, at that. If it works for you, great, but don't pretend we all have to stay there with you.
Co-pilot Robert, after finally getting full control back from Co-pilot Bonin: "Damn it, we're going to crash... This can't be happening!"

Co-pilot Bonin, who had been pulling back & stalling the plane during the crisis: "But what's happening?"

Pretty much sums it up. I am thinking that perhaps Bonin had shellshock & may not have even realized he was holding the stick back. Perhaps the more experienced Robert didn't think to ask "are you pulling back the stick?" because that would be like asking "did you make sure the computer is plugged into the wall outlet?", i.e. it's so stupid & simple, that can't be "it".

There are a few things I could think that would be worth adding.

- Add a display that shows the current positions of both control sticks. Add an alarm when the two sticks are not within a certain margin of the each other, if both are engaged. Such as if one is full forward & the other is full back.

- Make clearer warnings about the implications of the "alternate law" mode. Such as a warning like "Stalling possible". Also maybe put an alarm in the pilot resting area that would relay when warnings are detected like stall or switching to alternate law.

- Delineate command better, e.g. Captain, Co-pilot #1, Co-pilot #2 so that who is in charge is clear.
A lot of them are still useful abstractions (for vocabulary, if nothing else). In particular, I see Strategy patterns used all over the place (but not referred to as such), as well as Adapters, Bridges, Decorators, Facades and Proxies...but most people who have claimed to have read the book couldn't tell you the differences between those ideas.

Lots of people seem to independently "re-invent" the Observer and Visitor patterns (badly), which is a shame, because there's lots of room for subtlety in their implementations. And of course, Ruby makes use of Interpreter all over the place, and frameworks like Rails use Command, Chain of Responsibility, Mediator, Template Method, and so on...but don't really call them by their names. Blargh.
I will be disappointed if this comment is given up votes.
Who exactly will do this? No major car company would risk their reputation selling a car with that programmed into its software.

What's the risk, exactly?

Our car has an "ultra-economy mode" where the motor turns off when stationary - many cars already have this.

Our car can park itself - many cars already have this.

Our car will find a parking space, optimizing the route to and from the parking garage - that seems logical, why would a company not do that?

Our company will optimize the route to and from the parking garage, and the time spent in the garage vs on the road based on price vs economy of the car - why would a company not do that?

The problems only occurs when hundreds of cars independently make their own decision to drive as slowly as possible to and from the parking space.

(Edit: someone else pointed out that UPS routes their trucks to avoid left turns. This isn't too dissimilar to that - they do it to improve fuel economy, this would be done to improve costs too)
"Up to 14% of the online population uses an ad blocker"

I would bet you anything that far more of the general population would use ad blockers if they knew ad blockers existed, and if installation and use of an ad blocker could be made very simple and understandable to them.
Here it is: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html

It is in Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman.
The movie iRobot was an interesting take on such a future.

In a few scenes in the movie, the female lead (the robot psychologist?) reacts in horror to Will Smith manually driving his petrol driven motobike because it has not auto-pilot and 'you realise petrol is explosive don't you?!?'

And after Will Smith has the forced accident in the tunnel (when attacked by the robots), his boss accuses him of unsafe driving because the blackbox reported that he had disengaged the auto-pilot.

So quite conceivably we'll end up in a future where manual car driving is seen in the same light as drink driving or speeding is seen today.
My landlord will likely be fairly distressed with this news. ;)
>Driverless cars always in motion are basically public transit

Minus the cost of the driver.

The point of ubiquitous driverless cars, is that one could get to you so quickly that for all intents and purposes it would always be there.

Also they don't always have to be in motion. Just give people a discount on service if they let cars park in their driveways while waiting for instructions.
I am a pilot (a small one but instrument rated) - there's no time EVER that you want that, and I am shocked the Airbus does not have a warning that says DUAL INPUT BEING RECEIVED. At the very least, it should give priority to the left seat controls.

Was really shocked to read the article.
Facebook tells India it won’t help censor the Web
Perhaps I'm more of a 'consultant' than 'contractor', but I tend to do as much as I can to learn and understand the company's business when I do work for them. Some companies appreciate that and help me dive deep in to the business and industry, and others don't.

"Contractors" are not the be-all and end-all, but in the context of the original article - Digg hired too many people - it's an obvious no-brainer in hindsight to say some of those hires should have been contractors and the relationship revisited after 6 or 12 months.
Thoughts On Taking the Entrepreneurship Plunge
Qualcomm Released New AR SDK 1.5 For Android. iOS Version to Come.
It's so basic that we really shouldn't have to talk about it: this is personal presentation, interaction, humanity. The trouble is people who live in a virtual world lose much of that consciousness (and it's happened to me as well before).
A computerised pathologist that can outperform its human counterparts
For an even earlier FRP paper, see http://conal.net/papers/ActiveVRML/, about the first implementation of what came to be called "FRP". Fran was my reimplementation of that system after I found Haskell.
[PHP] Simple MySQL Injection Solution
Not to mention the immediate efficiency hit of the car driving empty between rides.
Apple Silent On iOS 5.0.2 Release To Fix Battery Drain
Yes, I agree this could be an option.

But I'm not optimistic about the share-car thing, at least in cities without a strong existing public transport system. In most cities too many people travel at rush-hour, with unique route requirements (dropping kids at school etc).
Oh please...
Kevin Drum has argued that once computers are smart enough to drive trucks, what are truck drivers going to do instead? Computers will be smart enough to do just about anything else they could do.

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/who-will-tend-mach...
Is there no such thing as a credit score in the UK? Or does paying credit cards not improve your credit score?

The banking industry in the US is messed up, but how does it not make sense that responsibly paying loans doesn't indicate you are more likely to make good on future loans?
Capturing More Value Than You Create
I'm still curious about the details of his conversations with his users about why they choose Android. Are any of them choosing an Android phone because of the Android OS or app ecosystem? Aside from some hackers that might like the hackability and extensibility of the Android OS, or people that reject Apple because of their business practices or philosophies, I strongly suspect most users that buy Android phones "because they prefer it" are really preferring the hardware of their specific phone.

I don't think anyone denies that there are Android phones with amazing hardware specs (great screens, slim designs, fast CPUs, etc.). I just have trouble believing that people (other than the exceptions I mentioned earlier, which I highly doubt are a significant percentage of Android users) who have used both Android and iOS truly prefer the Android OS.
hmm. that makes a lot of sense. can you suggest some reading that can help me understand which types to use? I'm almost entirely self-taught on SQL so the result is "functional" code that's just not well-designed or optimal
Every time I think that I read too much I take a break and miss something that I know I would have liked, needed or benefitted from.

And then I end up in the other place where I have tabs of articles and kindle's of books, instapaper and reading list full.

Right now, since I'm in "startup" mode I'm both producing (code, writing, on-boarding docs) and consuming and I'm completely overwhelmed. But I wouldn't have it any other way.
To be fair, Aonuma has been head honcho for the last 4 games or so. It's still a pretty big deal that Miyamoto is leaving, but the transition was smooth.
The biggest opportunity I can see here is Cars as a Service. Basically an automated taxi service you pay $50/month for to use a car whenever you want. You fire up the caas app,order a car, and the nearest one comes and grabs you. The best part: not location dependent. Your membership is good in any city (heck, even any country). It would be the end of taxis and even public transportation.
I had never heard of these HTTP headers before. Thank you for the pointers.
Here's a related question: What will cities look like with driverless cars being shared by groups of people? Parking needs will diminish significantly, allowing cities to become more dense, yet because the cost of driving will be reduced (by splitting the ownership costs of cars, by increasing the rate of shared commuting, and by allowing commuters to spend their transit time being productive), demand for urban land for residential areas may decrease overall. So my best guess is that in many cities commercial areas will become more dense, but residential areas could enter a decline. Any other ideas?
The way to play the cash giftcard game is to take advantage of the cashback of the paying card. For example, Discover had a promotion on CyberMonday that paid $100 if I spent at least $1000 on that day. I didn't have anything pending to buy on that particular day, so I bought an $1000 Amex giftcard paid with the Discover card, pocketing the $100 cashback and had the $1000 giftcard to use in daily usage.
IIRC, that was lesson 1, minute 2 (right after take-off). The previous commenter who said that wouldn't think to ask because it is akin to asking 'is the computer plugged in' is probably right (though the captain should have noticed it when he was observing).

Serious design flaw, and tragic human error with devastating results. :(
Most traffic is caused by the delay in human reaction times, and driverless cars can operate safely at much higher speeds and at much higher densities. Roads could handle massively more traffic if they were only packed with driverless cars.
Oil changes can easily be automated. Electric vehicles? All they need is a parking spot to automatically pull into and charge at until required to move to their next waypoint.
'MythBusters' hosts: sorry about that cannonball (includes pics of damage)
True. But, how would you want to handle the situation of two equally competent(at least in the eyes of the employer) co-pilots vying for control? should it always go to one? always go to the other? have a switch controlled? controlled by whom? not easy questions if you ask me.

edit: I actually can't think of a good way to do that other than have a manual switch on the console that would switch between the two controls. anything else seems amazingly bad.
Yep, a single agent can support multiple apps.
I think the "value on the open market" comparison is even more questionable than that. A market is only efficient if its transaction costs are low (and if there are few barriers to entry). If you're buying a gift card on eBay, consider the transaction. First, you need to think to go to eBay. (Had the idea occurred to you before this?) Then you've got to find the thing on eBay in a reasonable denomination, submit a bid, wait around a while to win the bid (possibly days, if you even win the bid, which you maybe-won't), pay the seller, wait a week for it to come in the mail, hope that you haven't been defrauded (possibly checking its balance), and then store it somewhere and remember to use it.

That's a lot more of a hassle than just getting it as a gift, storing it somewhere, and remembering to use it.
Sure, they haven't been surprised but they surely have had enough parts replaced that we can consider then new cars several times over.

You make a good point that a fleets maintained better than the average citizen but they will still break down and still need to be replaced faster that the author is stating. We will still have roughly the same amount of turnover over the course of a decade.
Ah, college kids. Say... do they sell beer at that grocery store?
I'd say it's even less complex. My non-techie friends who have bought Android, did it for one of two reasons (I've actually asked many of them!):

* They wanted a smartphone, but they live on the east coast (NYC). For sometime, iPhone was only on AT&T, and AT&T had a reputation for bad reception there. I believe this has improved in the recent years, though, and well, Verizon and Sprint are also in the game now.

* They made an arbitrary choice based on a current promotion, TV ads, look of the phone, screen size, etc., without any deep knowledge of the app ecosystem or hackability. There were also a couple who have never owned an Apple product, but felt that Apple was too trendy, and wanted to get something "different."

IMO, Android and iOS are two very different beasts that look the same if you were to just compare the specs. Both have phones with touch screens. Both have apps. Both have cameras, etc, etc. This is how users compare. We know that these are not the useful criteria for comparison. But how would you reasonably explain this to a non-tech user?
Surely he's been in exciting situations in simulators, at least? (And if not, he probably should arrange for some simulated excitement :)
Could they not simply have looked out the window and understood? Or simply felt gravity in their bodies? A 40 degree incline is pretty severe, wouldn't it be obvious?
People have multiple cars because they want to live among people who can afford multiple cars, and more specifically avoid the urban poor who cannot afford them. American car dependent suburbia exists in large part due to white flight. I imagine cheap driver-less cars would screw up this system.
If only.

Unless you empathize with mistakes like this, it's very difficult to prevent them in the future. You're always going to have people who make mistakes in any system you design. The trick is to design the system so that mistakes are easily corrected, even when multiple ones are compounded.

It's akin to someone dropping a table of unrecoverable user data. Sure, it was dumb on their part, but why the hell is it possible for you to lose all your data from a single mistake?
"We are spending a fortune to undereducate ourselves"
way too easy for you to say without being in the situation.

heavy turbulence, no visibility, confusing situation, very likely that he was disoriented, operating a very complex set of computer programs hooked up to a very complex set of physical controls that have a myriad of potential configurations and points of failure while trying to debug it at the same time in a panic and making quick decisions.

from his vantage point, it is likely that the stall warning is a symptom of something malfunctioning and not an actual stall.

that said, i thought that "if stall, you push forward" was instilled into pilots to the point of 2nd nature. i'm very surprised at the reaction to the stall warning.
Even if you get more passenger miles, there might still be an increase due to more total trips taken. Imagine if you could get off work on Friday, head out at 7 PM and make 600 miles by dawn while still getting a good night's sleep. You have the weekend to do what you want, and then Sunday night you sleep through the drive home, and are ready to go back to work Monday morning. I'd probably take a road trip twice a month. As it is, I wouldn't consider going 600 miles unless I had at least 5 days off, which essentially means once a year.
Marco's reply: http://www.marco.org/2011/12/07/standing-up-for-android
On the other hand, there was no concept of "rooting" your Windows installation, and the idea that you could only run apps approved by Microsoft would have caused immediate outrage and accusations of anticompetitive behavior. It's amazing how quickly Apple has been able to shift the Overton window, to the point where there's barely any reaction to Microsoft requiring approval for Windows 8 Metro apps.
Biography,profile,picture
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The Startup Guys
Only in person, where you can use cash anyways.

Online they don't work, unless you get one of the few which allow you to fill in a real SSN matched to a real address, etc. -- at least in the US. If I recall correctly, it's due to a section of the Patriot Act. And apparently they actually verify the SSN+name now. I'm not aware of any prepaid credit cards that allow anonymous online purchases now in 2011, in the US.
If cars are getting 20 times more use they will wear out much more quickly than they do now.

Existing cars, if driven 20 times as much, would wear out 20 times more quickly, like taxicabs do now.

But it's also possible that cars would simply be built with more reliable components and more durable materials, like current aircraft and public transit vehicles are.

It's not cost-effective to build an ultra-reliable car that's sitting idle 96% of the time, but the economics would surely change if the utilization rate is much higher.
Apple loses lawsuit in China, has to pay $1.6 billion or rename iPad
Making a computer that can fly without airspeed makes less sense to me than making an airspeed sensor that either doesn't ice, or can de-ice itself. Is that so impossible?
great article from good friend, Joseph.
Or we'll get a car design with a removable trunk.
With a model more like Car2Go (pick up the car wherever you can find one, leave it wherever you want to) this isn't as much of an issue. In Austin there's pretty much always a car within a few blocks... almost "driveway-level" accessibility.

And if even 10% of drivers switch to using this model, then there's always going to be a car on your block. That's pretty competitive.

With driverless cars it's even less of an issue, because the car will literally drive from the end of the block (where it's waiting) to your door.
oh yeah...

due to a complicated set of fortunate circumstances i once got an observer seat during re-current simulator training (happens every 6 months).

all the flying i've ever done was on ms flight simulator, but i know enough to read gauges and what not. it was so intense that even i was too stressed to finish paying attention to the whole session. lots of exciting situations there.

and stop calling me surely.
Ask HN: Already incorporated, want to give part of company to cofounder. How?
DE C Corp. I own 100%. Want to give % to new cofounder.
I can't upvote this enough, people seem stuck in their concept of what a car is. Without a driver we are free to redesign cars in so many ways.

We no longer need to worry about designing it so that the driver can see every angle, so we can design more efficient seating layouts. We can even add partitions so the 10 passengers don't have to see each other.

Long distance deliver vehicles can operate at lower fuel efficient speeds.

We can combine delivery and passenger vehicles.

The list is endless.
America needs to get back to its roots as the premier boozing nation. We were long known for this. Hell, there was practically a civil war over the whole whiskey rebellion thing.
I want one and I have money - when they're available, why wouldn't I be able to buy one?

I think you would, but the conventional wisdom around owning your own car would along the lines of the current CW surrounding owning your own aircraft: it would be something for wealthy enthusiasts, not the general public.
This reminds me of a thread on Whirlpool started by one of the ShiftyJelly guys: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1728780#

It's a substantial change in opinion after six months.
I actually went looking.
Eh, that's doubtful actually. In most US cities (other than, say NYC, SF, and a handful of others), taxi service is expensive and slow to arrive. Parking is free, and cars can be obtained relatively cheaply.
The Future of USPS
Supposedly they do de-ice themselves, but that obv didn't work properly here.
Downloading Dropbox is a common use case. Wanting to hide the tiny icon in the menu bar is a rare use case.