skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I ride a bike and drive a car. And while doing both, I do my best to obey the laws and not injure other people. In Boston, and more specifically in my area of Cambridge we have major issues with drivers turning without looking at the bike lane and bikers running through red lights or riding on sidewalks.

In MA, we have very specific laws regarding how bikes are to be treated under the law and whenever riding I abide by them because they exist to keep myself (most important) and others safe. As the biker nearly hit me (I fortunately jumped out of the way with less than a foot of clearance), he yelled at me calling me an asshole and continued through the intersection with himself having a red light.

I watched a college kid die last year while walking to work as he slammed into the side of a truck. It ignited a debate about who was at fault and if trucks should be allowed to turn at that intersection. Nothing but finger pointing was done, a young man was killed, and just last week another pedestrian was hit at that same intersection crossing the street to catch the T.

Our transportation is changing in this country and instead of adjusting, in most areas we're just pointing the finger, much like you did in this post.
I think you misread. He's saying that it's better for everyone if a robot hits debris every now and then vs a human driver that causes 100ish deaths a day.

According to http://www.nhtsa.gov/NCSA a pedestrians is killed every two hours and injured every 7 minutes. A robot car would reduce these rates to near zero.
> If they had been faster after Google Hangouts, it never would have gained a beachhead.

That's why Microsoft took so long to do this. They had little incentive to do so until others did, and even when the writing on the wall was clear, they still faced the innovator's dilemma.
That's pretty remarkable, actually. I see he's going to CMU in the fall, which is a win for CMU. He's obviously a smart dude.
Very true but Skype appears to present a much bigger problem for reverse engineering (I have only seen someone reverse engineer the texting part of Skype and not the video)
It already does this just fine.
It appears to let you add your own animation primitives, instead of being restricted to composing changes to the animatable CALayer properties.

Could be useful for some things.
Tolkien: "Let's get one thing clear, I'm the smartest guy in the room".
if there is a large object in the middle of the highway in broad daylight i am pretty sure humans navigate it pretty well since their eyes can see it far ahead due to color contrast, pattern recognition etc. the human visual system seems to excel in this situation and it seems to be a one where LIDAR may be at a disadvantage, where the stakes are high.
There are lots of subtleties in in-town driving. For example, the Google car will crawl its nose forward just a bit to indicate when it thinks its turn has come at 3 and 4-way stops. This is a strong signal to the other drivers that the car is about to make the turn, and reduces the frequency of contentions inside the intersection.

It's a nice touch to have the robot replicate behaviour that most people are not even aware they are using.
As a boy, I was fond of a quote to the effect of "If all technology had progressed as quickly as computer technology, you would be able to buy a Space Shuttle at the corner store, fold it up and put it in your pocket, and fly it to Mars on a gallon of gas."

That was from the late '80s. By now, presumably, your gallon of gas would get you to Alpha Centauri.

I also find it kind of depressing that the excitement over the infinite potential of the Net has settled down to workaday humdrum.
Unless X is Python, then use Go (??)
Unfortunately the thing to think about here is that as these things become more mainstream, there will be less people who are even skilled enough to control a car. So in the long run, if the system works well, any part of the design that relies upon human intervention is doomed. Ultimately your stopgap would become the equivalent of giving the wheel to the child in the backseat: more dangerous than just letting the computer do its best.
Hell, no! Sure, 2FA was never designed to protect against device theft, but keeping the authenticator on a separate device helps a lot.
26 Hours – How I met with 26 startups for my birthday, and what we learned
working with technology teach me one thing: technology cannot solve everything :D

So what can be done with unknown situation encountered by the auto-car? alert the human: Please take control of the car, undetermined obstruction ahead (or something to that effect)
There was earlier discussion of this paper here about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5509254
most of the starvation in the world is because someone wants more profits along the way.
When X is Python, and "time X" is too slow.
I would think this rule (law?) applies more to prevent gridlock... If you don't have enough room to actually be on the other side of the intersection after you've finished the turn, you shouldn't start it.
> "Collapsed while hiking." The only way that can happen is with an interruption in blood flow, which means a clot or a bleed.

or just due to plain old heatstroke and/or going beyond your physical limit (on that given day and for you given overall condition for that day). You should at least have mentioned whether you know this hills. I hike a lot in the East Bay, and if i remember the Sat was pretty sunny.
In fact, if someone were to use the term 'fundamentalism' in any other way I'd be a bit annoyed at them for obfuscating the conversation by using a word in a non-idiomatic fashion.
Superoptimization is finding -the- optimal program to perform a task, as opposed to optimization which only looks for better programs. Loop-free means... no loops.

That said, their approach does not actually give you the superoptimal solution, since it is a stochastic search.
This is the core animations and interactions library used in Paper app for iOS. I am looking forward to see some examples and tutorials on this, because for someone like me with no experience on UIAnimation, I guess it is something fairly easy to use when there are samples out there.
SociaLitmus Social Media Command Center for 2014 FIFA World Cup
I doubt it's a grudge. Accusing your competitor of sending money to the Kremlin in a time when the U.S.-Russia relationship isn't exactly great is simply a well-executed political jab.
One has a gigantic ecological impact from mining activities, the other there's no ecology to speak of to be impacted.
Or, in other words, advanced languages have some cognitive overhead that people working on extraordinarily complex applications can't spare?

Maybe. Then again, I've been using C++ again recently and I feel like the cognitive overhead there is so huge that I can barely understand my simple programs. Nonetheless, Microsoft pretty much runs on C++ (and C#).
Why do you feel this is worth pointing out?
Standard reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesign...

tl;dr ideas are always welcome, but most redesigns ignore that the site is not US-only, English-only or Latin-only.
I've used both sql.js and WebSQL. Sql.js will get the job done in a lot of cases, but it is not a perfect substitute. Sql.js's performance is an order of a magnitude worse than WebSQL when put under heavy load (this likely has more to do with ASM vs true native code than Sql.js in particular). Particularly, sql.js starts to stutter at a far lower query load than WebSQL for a given machine. Furthermore, Sql.js uses sqlite3_exec() under the hood, which means that all results get converted to strings, regardless of the underlying type of the column. And finally, effective memory capacities are not the same.
Your belief in the superiority of your own mattress-avoiding abilities seems odd. One likely outcome of a meat module detecting a mattress ahead at 70MPH would probably be to slam on the brakes, lose control, flip over the barrier, slam head-first into a van full of little kids on a field trip where a dozen people die in the fire and it's all over the local news. Whereas a computer-driven car is likely to 1) detect such a large obstacle well in advance, 2) apply the brakes as safe levels while it thinks about something else to do, and 3) safely maneuver around the object within the performance envelope of the vehicle.

Frankly, although I'm not pinning this on you, the widespread belief in one's own superiority is part of the problem with the legacy human driver.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A WOMAN CHEATS- YOU WON'T BELIEve THIS
I don't know either. I've been using Google Hangouts for the last few months, and those so easily could have been Skype chats instead if that was available. They let Google get so far along with this.
I actually don't follow the intuition. The thought of putting a smart fortwo into a barrier at speed terrifies me, whereas I've done it in a Toyota Camry (pedestrian on freeway over blind crest, nowhere to go), gotten out unharmed, and driven a rental to work the next day. Also if I hit a pedestrian at 25mph I don't think it matters which I'm driving.

The ads don't help. They show the car's frame holding up a pickup truck and so forth; yeah, that's great and all, but how about crumple zones?
Yes. I lost ~30 pounds, down to roughly my ideal weight, kept steady for 2 or 3 years now. It slowly drifts back up during times I'm not doing Shangri La because I'm traveling or whatever, then falls again after.

(I'm going to cut my flaxseed oil consumption on the theory that it might have contributed to his death, as long as I don't hear otherwise, but there are other ways to hack the flavor-calorie association, like wearing a noseclip sometimes when you eat.)
Or "likelihood that program runs correctly if compiles correctly X" is too low, or "ability to write concurrent code in straight-line fashion rather than with callbacks X" is "too low".
Apart from keyboard and mouse, pad and pen, there's nothing on my desk I couldn't go a week without. I'd rather lose the pad and pen, but they're useful.
The problem is that these advancements are one-offs and are increasingly difficult to both create and adopt. There was a great paper I read on compiler optimizations (I was a language guy in college) that pointed out that compiler optimizations were responsible for maybe a 2x improvement in program speeds, whereas CPU improvements were responsible for 1000x.

Almost all the singularity-type techno-optimism was based on a curve drawn during the amazingly magical part of CPU development: shrink the die, double the speed.

We are now past that, although many techno-optimists are casting around for a reason it will continue.
Yes, but he was talking programmers out there, not Google. IIRC, in 2012, they were still _very_ reluctant to talk about any use of Go within Google, with vitess being the only exception.
Investors are like employees in the sense that you have to actually work and get along with them. Unlike employees, however, you can't fire the investors. So in theory you should be more careful with investors than employees (and we all know to be careful when hiring). I can thus understand if investors view price optimizing as incredibly short sited and a character flaw.
Looking through the summary (and working from memories a while back, so I may be confusing stuff for this super optimizer with other super optimizers), they have a two step process for verification. For certain fixed inputs they check that the code outputs the same values (this can also be used as a hashing mechanism). Then afterwards they do symbolic comparison of the initial asm and the final asm, by converting each asm sequence into SMT[1] statements, feeding them the same input symbols and checking that their output symbols are the same. The tricky part here is doing the conversion as there are also many x86-64/SSE instructions; however, once you've done it you can just use an off-the-shelf solver.

This is why it is important that the code is loop free, because otherwise you couldn't use SMT and essentially would have to solve the halting problem. However, SMT, like SAT, is a NP-complete problem, but the good thing is that in most cases (according to the paper) solving the SMT problems generated is quick as they weren't designed to be diabolical.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfiability_Modulo_Theories
| You will if it's bigger than the alliwed hand baggage size.

Sure, but that's your own fault and nothing to complain about.
In the traffic signal example, the lights can be programed, with a whitelist of all IDs which are allowed to change the signals, and where the signals can be reprogrammed, to mitigate cloning.

I presume that any sort of illegal device which modifies car-to-car communications for other than safety reasons would not be tied to an id registered to a specific car. If only because those devices may need to be replaced, making a registration headache.

I also presume that there won't be a global upload/download of the message traffic for centralized analysis, so who do you think will be doing the recording and analysis?
I agree with the spirit of the article, and would like to add that the thing that bugs me about these Wikipedia re-designs is that none of these designers seem to know that it's quite easy to add your own CSS and restyle Wikipedia.

I've been rocking my own Wikipedia theme for over a year now:

https://github.com/geetotes/wikipedia-theme
With homebrew and homebrew-cask installed on Mac OS 10.9, I was simply able to do:

brew cask install java

That might not cover the bases for every Java developer's needs, but leiningen seems to work fine with the resulting installation.
There's the simple issue of legal liability, though. If you crash into someone, it's your fault and you can be taken to court for it. If a Google driverless car crashes into someone then it's Google's fault. That's an extremely large number of potential crashes and legal challenges.

Absent any higher concern, Google has to be very careful about this out of their own self-interest.
Black Market Site DarkMarket Claims to be Invulnerable to Feds
once that technology becomes available and reliable,

Mining useful things in outer space is at least 10 years away, plus at least another 10 to make it "reliable."

And what would it accomplish? If you brought an asteroid full of volatiles into LEO, and then converted it into LOX and LH2 before the asteroid burnt off and then developed a cryogenic storage system and then used a constant supply of the fuel for station keeping, you could have a fueling station in LEO. So I guess you could launch a smaller rocket from Earth, spend fuel to rendezvous with the fuel station, fuel up, and then go to Mars.

How much will that save you? A Falcon 9 launch is about $50 million. A SpaceX developed heavy-launch will probably cost $100 million or $200 million, but maybe you could get by with a Falcon 9 for about $50 million.

So, you've saved $50 million to $150 million, assuming this all works perfectly, on a mission that will costs several billion, and massively increased the complexity by requiring a stop and refueling in orbit. (And I pretended that bringing the asteroid into LEO and keeping it there and mining it there and preserving the fuel there all had a cost of $0.00.)

This isn't a "stepping stone." This is at best a side show, at worst a permanent delay to a manned Mars mission, because these kind of "well, once that technology becomes available and reliable, it would help, right?" issues are limitless. There is no end of the things that you could do instead because they might eventually some day if everything works right make a Mars mission a tiny margin easier.

This is exactly the problem the SEI had when designing a trip to Mars. Bush said he wanted one, and so NASA put every possible thing they could on the critical path to make sure everyone's pet technology would get funded.

It got a price tag of $450 billion and Congress reacted by zeroing out every single expenditure for it.

Here are REAL stepping stones:

1. Build a heavy-launch vehicle.

2. Put a lab onto Mars capable of manufacturing fuel from the Martian atmosphere.

3. Develop a landing system to put a 10+ ton payload onto the surface of Mars.

4. Launch a few spacecraft with artificial gravity and after several unmanned launches put some people in them for a few days / weeks / months (doing some other mission if you want).
I've never really had a good G+ Hangout video call. The video from others is always so terrible. I used Skype Video for years, to remote parts of the world even, and had few problems.
WebSQL is remarkably simple to use, works on the most popular browsers on mobile and desktop, and gives you the power of SQL. In contrast, IME indexed db felt like pulling teeth. The discussions seem to suggest that institutional intransigence by Mozilla pushed the internet back a step. (And yes, SQLite + Emscripten is significantly slower than websql on chrome and iOS Safari)
I don't doubt that generics are very useful, but its a problem when every thread that mentions Go gets polluted by bitching from people who can't code without them.

I work with SQL mostly, and in find common table expressions very useful to simplify and (in some cases) enhance performance. When faced with a choice between MySQL and PostgreSQL, I could either 1) choose to gripe about the lack of CTEs in MySQL, or 2) use PostgreSQL.

Something about generics make so many people on HN choose the equivalent of (1).
Yes, the return statement was what I was referring to. You can't use a type switch to do some sort of an implicit conversion that exists outside of the switch statement.
Handycipher: a Low-tech, Randomized, Symmetric-key Cryptosystem
Preaching to the choir!
> even though colonies have queens, there is no central control

This is important. A lot of times I describe to people how ants are a perfect example of a cooperative anarchical society, and they say "Well what about the queen!!"

"Queen" is a misnomer. She is really just another ant whos job it is to lay eggs. This job tends to be less expendable than others, so the queen is more protected (from what I know), but she's still "equal" in the sense that nobody gives orders, everything is self-organizing.
Smartphones and the 4th Amendment
Yep. Namely: typeface, font size, line height, margins, font color, background color. Those are some pretty basic properties you'll want to set for even the most minimal design. CSS is how you set them. (I suspect that almost nobody would want to use the browser defaults for all these values.)
Ncurses bindings for Node.js
Apparently Mercedes Benz has come quite far regarding autonomous driving.

In September 2013 they let one of their S-Class models drive the historic route from Mannheim to Pforzheim in Germany with some journalist(s) on board[1].

On this route the worlds first long-distance (194km/121mi) ride in a motorized car was undertaken in 1888 by Bertha Benz, wife of Carl Benz, who developed, what is known today as the worlds first modern automobile.[2]

This route contains interurban as well as urban parts. The prototype car nicknamed "Bertha" is not easily recognizable from a standard S-Class model, which already contains most of the systems necessary to enable autonomous driving.

[1] Google translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&pr...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz_Memorial_Route
Currently there is no evidence for any relation between his methods and his death. The cause of death either hasn't been determined yet or is currently private.

It's already apparent for reasons exclusive of this that experimenting on yourself is a bad idea. However it is fallacious to just assume that his actions led to his death like this and to claim outright like you are is irresponsible.
Totally. OpenCV was my first case of encountering and having then to work out a way around bugs in something that's supposed to "just work". Not many other options, though.
No, it failed a pile of really obvious client requirements: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-August...

This is the page where we try to be polite about designers' crappy redesigns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesign...
REPLs are for toying around and learning. The Go playground provides an alternative that seems to satisfy these needs for most people. If people really missed a Go REPL then the existing ones would not be "curiosities".
This is not a 16 year old kid but the lead engineer of Heroku.

> Go is something like a simplified C

Not is it not. Go is a shitty C. Try writing a kernel and Go and see what happens.
What if you just send BTC? I mean, without a presence in Italy, their courts can't reach you anyways.
looks like it's switching to copy-friendly presentation, so that code can be copied without line numbers (?).

I'm able to toggle between plain text and syntax highlighting via the '<>' icon @ the top of the code blocks.
I think many experienced programmers forget how hard it was to write good code in the first place, whatever abstraction they started to use. I "learned" Java and C++ very quickly. I'm sure I was banging out code and stopped looking up most things within weeks. However, it took me years to actually understand how to write good code in those languages. I had to learn the patterns, I had to learn where the short-cuts and sharp edges were. I had to learn what features to avoid and which ones to embrace. It took a long time, but now it's all habit and instinct. I don't even have to think about it.

Asking someone to switch to using a new paradigm—like moving from OOP to FP—is asking them to relearn how to structure a program. All those habits and instincts no longer apply and new ones need to be learned. It takes years to learn how to write good high-quality FP programs. I know I'm still learning and I first picked up Haskell as a primary hobby four years ago. It probably took me a year before I really understood what a monad was and could apply that abstraction, similar to how long it took me to really understand and apply things like visitor patterns.

I believe that if you took an entirely untrained person you could get them to be at least as productive if you taught them with FP versus OOP from the start.
You Won't Believe these 7 habits of top headline writers!
Use return instead of rewrite.

server {
listen 80;
server_name www.website.tld;
return 301 http://website.tld$request_uri;
}
LIDARs are not better sensors than our eyes. They are different, but not better.

The human eye is an amazing instrument. Contrast range of 24 stops vs. 16 in a top of the line camera. (Think 24 bit ADC vs. 16 bit). Follow that up with 24 bit color depth and the ability for our eyes to automatically adjust what portion of the spectrum we're focusing on, and you've got a spectacular sensor.
I'm a "C programmer" that loves working in Go.
True. Things like the Crays have their own, specialized interconnects and OS (on work nodes). A lot of things that aren't trying to be in the top can use fiber channel for similar results, though.
Not sure I follow.

When single threaded top-down Python is too slow for a particular task, of late I find it easier/cleaner/faster to use Go routines than multiprocessing / threading in Python, because of the way concurrency was designed in Go, but added to Python.

> "ability to write concurrent code in straight-line fashion rather than with callbacks X"

Same concept or different point?
Facebook in the Age of Mobile Only
Oh, whoops. I posted a comment to the wrong thread! (There, the op is actually a 16 year old who is surprised Haskell is a better Haskell than Go.)

Try writing a kernel and Go and see what happens.

It's not that kind of language. A kernel written in Haskell would be very interesting, however.
But if everyone used the same buggy implementations there would still be a problem. Web developers usually write for the implementation, not the spec.
No? I don't think you read the link.
I think he probably started searching for answers after he posed his original question, and found some. Not that he was asking a question he knew the answer to.