skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your post seems to ignore the very real possibility that criminals will prepare their cars by customizing the programming prior to the crime. Does your car have a remote disable switch? Hack the car and turn it off. If you have arbitrary physical access to the car, then it will be very difficult to stop you from doing this.

As others have commented, you really do have to take into account the worst-case scenarios. Even if automated cars are a win in 99.9% of the cases, the 0.1% of failures (intentional or not) may be devastating.
All the police probably have to do to stop an autonomous vehicle is to turn on their lights. Autonomous vehicles have to follow all traffic laws, which would include stopping for emergency vehicles.
Very good point. There is an NIH study [1] that drills into Law Enforcement Officers (LOEs). The number in the NIH study can be contrasted with the right side of slide 14. The mortality rate does raise a but from the Government rate, from 2/100k to 5.6 when you are talking homicide and 11.8 when considering all causes of fatalities; still puts it 3rd compared to other industries.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20564516
The FBI didn't say it was a bad tradeoff.
Then the headline is misleading. The car isn't the lethal weapon; the car is enabling the occupant to do dangerous and illegal things.
the real question is why in the world were they now?
Guess how many people think Airbnb's new logo look like a
I always just assumed that driverless cars would come with a remote kill switch that law enforcement and public safety officials could use.

Even if we ignore this particular threat scenario, what happens if someone has a heart attack, is passed out in an automatic car (as seen by other cars on the road), the cops/ambulance turn up but are unable to get to the person to give them aid?

Or if an automatic car somehow malfunctions and starts driving the wrong way down the freeway/motorway.
With svn, maybe. With git, pretty much everything is a branch.
oh man... the evil in me laughs with glee at this.

But honestly, it couldn't be done. Not with the upload restrictions at the end of the pipe.
Card Architecture  Card Design
It's also rational to minimize stress by convincing yourself that the risk is actually low.

The dude asked for a rational perspective. I gave it. If you want to insist that people should avoid one of the safest activities in the history of civilization because it's rational to avoid fear, well, go for it, but you're not going to convince me.
Automate log analysis on Google Cloud Platform with new Read API
Agreed. A law enforcement kill switch requirement is probably something that will be discussed as agencies talk through compromises that enable this to happen. (Can't think through all of the pros/cons to this)

That said, if someone is skillful enough to program an autonomous vehicle, they'll probably figure out a way to get around a kill switch as well - like any technology, it can be used for both good and bad. Risk can't be completely removed, but can be sufficiently mitigated. I'm glad the report addressed both sides of the argument, and I'm a bit disappointed that the BBC chose to sensationalize one small conclusion to such an extent.
There should be only one question from the rep: Is there anything we can do to change your mind? If the customer responds with anything indicating a willingness to discuss rates or packages, then by all means continue. If the customer says: No, I just want to cancel. Then turn it off.
An autonomous semi-truck that drives through crowds?

I understand that there are maniacs out there, but the technical skill required to do this combined with the cost and the level of insanity would make this scenario pretty unreasonable to consider a valid threat. Not saying it couldn't happen, but there are easier ways to cause a similar amount of damage.

How would I stop it?

- Box it in with dump-trucks, other semis, or armored vehicles.

- Use a tank or other armored vehicle from one of the many armories located everywhere.

- Use one of those MRAPs that the military has been giving law-enforcement recently.

- Shoot out tires.

- Armor piercing or 50 caliber rounds to the engine.

- Remote shutoff that is impossible to disengage without also disabling the GPS.

- I'm very close to a major air-force base, they have plenty of ways to stop a civilian semi-truck.

- Use one of the many armed drones, a military helicopter, or even an armed aircraft. I'd have no problem with the US military using an air-to-ground missile to take out a autonomous vehicle that was programmed to do harm, as long as they were sure that there would be zero civilian casualties.
/dev/urandom never blocks, even if it means returning randomness before the system has gathered enough entropy to safely seed a CSPRNG.

/dev/random blocks whenever the system's "entropy count" is too low, even if the system has previously gathered enough entropy to produce secure randomness. The frequent blocking of /dev/random makes it unsuitable for practical use while providing questionable security benefit.

getrandom() blocks only until the system has gathered enough entropy to safely seed a CSPRNG, and then never blocks again. (Assuming the GRND_BLOCK flag and not the GRND_RANDOM flag.)

An in-depth explanation: http://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/
This particular article says nothing about an "international air corridor". You owe him an apology for accusing him of not reading the article when you clearly did not read it yourself.
Article summary: Driver-less car leaves more hands free for evil people to do evil things.

Someone FOI the FBI's report on hands-free sets and prosthetic limbs please.
"Access to a huge panoply of books that are either in public domain or for which we're pretty sure most of you wouldn't pay for anyway!"
@sheetjs: I'm sorry, but I simply cannot follow the logic in the Verizon argument that you quote. You quote:

"Netflix chose to attempt to deliver that traffic to Verizon through a few third-party transit providers with limited capacity over connections specifically to be used only for balanced traffic flows"

But isn't that a misstatement of fact? CDNs like Level3 do nothing but transfer data, usually media files, onto consumer ISP networks when those ISP's customers' request them.

In what dream world are Akamai and Level3 receiving as much data from Verizon's consumer network as they are sending? Why would any ISP expect a link with a CDN to have a balanced traffic flow?
I wonder in this case whether it was a false positive. Lots of people want to support a project like this and it's fairly natural to email people and tell them that the link has been posted.

The only reason I don't do that any more is that someone told me about the voting ring detector.
Not if you override that bit of logic in the system. Cars are reprogrammed all the freaking time - for performance reasons.

It's not very far fetched to do the same for other nefarious reasons.
Which is not how it works in the rest of the world. Only U.S. consumers are so used to getting screwed that they would defend it as normal. Verizon loves double-billing so much for cell service that they want to do the same with the internet.
Surely the universe of "bad guys willing to kill scores of people" is magnitudes larger than the universe of "bad guys willing to die to kill scores of people"?
That wouldn't work though. Verizon sells unbalanced services with larger download capacity than upload capacity. So it's simply not likely/possible that their customers can send matching data for what they are requesting. Additionally, while this might not negatively affect their FIOS customers their DSL customers are on asynchronous connections meaning that the uploaded data will negatively impact their ability to receive data at the same time in effect degrading their ability to stream and the quality of the video they can receive.
devops is the new xslt
Hint to FBI: Driverful cars can be lethal too.
i recently gave up my netflix and amazon prime because i was tired of streaming hanging up in the middle of an episode/movie. it was just annoying and embarrassing if i had guests.

now i just torrent everything so i can watch uninterrupted when i want. I consider i am still legal since i'm paying for both subscriptions yet and they pay the content. if not, not my problem.

but that raises a question... why the RIAA/MPAA is not using its bullying powers to harass ISP like verizon?

as i just showed, they are the reason lots of people are going back to torrents that do not make money to the studios like streaming services does. Why do they rather sue john does instead?
Netflix already paid Verizon's ransom and now Verizon is building connects to Netflix but such connections take time to install. Level 3 is arguing over old news at this point, but they're trying to set a precedent to prevent other ISPs from trying the same thing.
Pigeon photography
This is true, but humans scale a lot worse than automation. Now instead of convincing somebody to kill themselves, all I've gotta do is wire up 30 trucks to do what I need them to do. Didn't work? Do it again. Cars are cheap.

Discussing this keeps reminding me of Suarez's Daemon novels. Swarming changes many, many things.
To use your own analogy -- it would be as-if your phone provider charged you to call me (they do), my phone provider charged me to receive the call (they do), then my phone provider charged you for making the call (they don't).
I guess, but an unfinished game and source is pretty valueless. People who work on an unfinished think there work adds up to something valuable (an engine, some art) but I have seen people try to sell unfinsihed projects many times and they are almost never valuable. And they are only valuable when they come with a team that is passionate about continuing to work on them.
If the company has burned through all their money though, it's kinda hard to draw blood from a stone...
Yeah, that, too.
I call this bullshit.

As far as I know, criminals had always a designated driver for exactly those reasons. "bad actors will be able to conduct tasks that require use of both hands or taking one's eyes off the road which would be impossible today"

Looks like the FBI is just pushing to get a real-time interface into the car control. "Algorithms can control the distance that the patrol car is behind the target to avoid detection or intentionally have a patrol car make opposite turns at intersections, yet successfully meet up at later points with the target"
The UN thinks we could hit peak births in 2014
Probably because it will be slow and deplete the entropy pool. Statistical sampling doesn't require cryptographically-secure random number generation.
Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8049671

Also, what's to stop it from happening now?

Remember the guy that stole the tank? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AcVSEY2DP0

Remember the guy that built an armored vehicle out of a bulldozer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4nlcmmt8X0

Semi-trucks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3NKlzZmgl0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loUWmQdj70w

You'd have to equip it with run-flat tires to stand a chance.

Even an armed drone or helicopter would probably be publicly acceptable to stop it.
Inside Google Brain?
/dev/random is too severe. It's basically designed to be an information-theoretic random source, which means you could use its output as a one-time pad even if your adversary were time-travelling deities with countless universes full of quantum computers at their disposal. It blocks when you try to use it if there aren't enough bits to satisfy this.

/dev/urandom is too loose. It's designed to be computationally secure, which means that you could use it if your adversaries were stuck in our universe and had to make their computers out of matter and power them with energy. However, it never blocks, even if there isn't enough entropy in the pool.

We just need a PRNG that will spit out numbers as long as, say, 256 random bits were added to the pool at some point. Once you have that many bits, just keep on spitting out numbers.
Fighting a One-of-a-Kind Disease
I think I get your point on the Jobs mention, that you weren't dismissing him as a wannabe-Jobs so much as the culture and manner Jobs most prominently embodies. That's pretty fair, I think.

Though a Jobs-related counterpoint, Apple was in a pretty rough place at one time, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Amelio#Apple_Computer

I think it's still much too early to count Microsoft out, they've still got a whole lot of runway ahead of them before they run out, and cutting such a huge part of their work force could just buy them even more runway, enough to get their bearings and recover. I think it would be pretty interesting to see a post-Microsoft tech world, but I can't imagine that happening until a worthy successor dethrones them, rather than simply fading away.
Statistically, you'll be absolutely fine either way even though I don't buy that "now is the safest time to fly the airline" crap. For myself, having recently flown the reverse flight (KL to Amsterdam) and a handful of other MH flights recently, I would lose the extra money and sleep better on another carrier. I'll be choosing other carriers for the foreseeable future.

Two of only three fatal 777 crashes ever were MH planes. They were both total losses and both in the last five months. The airline has some work to do.
Not sure which language looks better here... I'd say that even with its greater popularity, JavaScript is worse in pretty much every aspect than OCaml.
Good to know. So I'm actually practicing CI the way that I work, I'm just not paying some company monthly fees for a CI server. So the difference between CI the practice and "CI wink wink" is $$$.
Level 3 is not just a CDN; it's a major backbone. Likewise Verizon is not just DSL & FIOS because Verizon Business is also a major backbone. Apparently Level 3 and Verizon did have balanced traffic for many years.
Take Pictures and Messages with Jibo the First Family Robot
Maybe add iPod Touch to the not supported list in the app description. Although I know there aren't many of us!
Yeah, me too. I don't think I've needed anything like this since... I don't understand why it's news all of a sudden.
Side note and possibly off topic. I have the 2001 Encarta dictionary, print edition! Wonderful book. Shame to see them shutting the project down. I wish they would release everything into the public domain.
If there were only 4 entities, your description would make perfect sense. It's a waterfall model, where the data only falls from Netflix to Level3 to Verizon to User.

But the Internet is a big hierarchy where things flow downhill. Every node can talk with every other node. Historically the networks would trade data freely if they were both doing an equal amount, but even 15 years ago I heard sober network engineers worrying that in the future there might be very unbalanced connections and what would be the fair way to deal with that.

NB: In the end I think Verizon is being purposefully difficult to their customers, but they are not completely unreasonable to think that having a lot of data sent into their networks [1] is just something they should STFU about.

[1] yes, even if you say "data requested by their customers" over and over again
It's a fair distinction. Here, I believe, the movie is going AWS Seattle to L3 to the front door of Verizon's consumer network in LA, and Netflix is paying for it all the way to the front door.

Is that accurate? Or no?
What is impressive about that movie ? To me it's quite the opposite.. it's not impressive at all (too dark, bad fps) and when I watch it there is something in it that causes head aches. It's very hard to watch.
Sorry but that kind of logic is a cop out. I can point to tons of other startups attacking small markets that could also become big. The founders are super talented too. I've met many of them personally. If the market you were attacking was expanding at a fast pace then your argument would make sense.

I would love to see a yc partner shed some light here.
I don't think that either is benefitting at the expense of the other. Netflix pays for huge amounts of bandwidth to all the residential ISPs where their customers are located. Verizon customers pay for huge amounts of aggregate bandwidth to Netflix and everywhere else on the internet. If there is more download traffic on Verizon's network than there is upload traffic it's only because that's all Verizon allows their customers to do. Contractually. They sell asymmetric plans. The results are not surprising.
If you are skilled in objective C, and you have good code samples to show it, I think it should not be hard to find a position. If you are thinking about doing this I think a good place to start is to see if you can pick up some freelance work with a company based in the area.
Well, that is a damned strange US custom that isn't the case in many other places. It is certainly not the case here in Europe, for example. The receiver pays.
To your two pricing questions, the answer is "sure, but":

1. Verizon, as a monopolist, is already pricing its service at the level that extracts the most revenue while remaining within the envelope of whatever loose regulation they have.

2. Netflix, as a company in a competitive market, can't easily increase prices without losing customers. If Netflix charges Verizon customers $9 and Hulu is only $8, it makes Netflix look less attractive, and they'd lose customers.
You can use Paypal on Google Play: https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/4646425?hl=en
>. if a project raises over 50k, they're obligated to hire a qualified and independent 3rd party to verify their project plan before any money is released.

Ya, that would be a complete logistical nightmare. It's simple: the more failures there are the in the market the more backers will react to projects with skepticism. The creators themselves then must go to greater lengths to prove the viability of the deliverable. If you end up getting sold vapourware then you learn a good life lesson for 50 bucks - caveat emptor.
That's actually a grey area. Following incidences of police impersonation, it was recommended that concerned people should turn on their blinker to acknowledge the police and safely drive to the nearest populated area before pulling over.

Having your car automatically and uncontrollably pull over every time red & blue lights are observed could lead to traps being set up on any backwoods road.

Edit: I really wish the news article would link to the actual source report so I could confirm it, but I bet that the above scenario is included in the FBI's hypotheticals.
> Meier was also a big fan of an early computer game called Empire, which combined Risk-like world domination with intricate city management. "At one point, [Meier] asked me to make a list of 10 things I would do to Empire to make it a better game," says Shelley. "That was some of his research on Civilization."

I'd always suspected that was the case. It's nice to hear an acknowledgement, and I'm happy Empire was an inspiration.

http://www.classicempire.com
Kickstarter need to create rules that protect the backers who can't reasonably be expected to understand the risks. 1% of the project's funds could've paid for an industry expert to take a look at their project plan and tell you they are likely going to fail.
> And Verizon has a legitimate argument that it is not based on the sustained differences in traffic flows

Verizon and comcast have been selling asymmetrical residential links since always. Verizon is advertising 500/100 on their homepage right now. They know damn well that people are pulling way more data than they're pushing, and the interconnect links from level3-to-ISP have always been hugely asymmetrical.
Hands-On with Google Cardboard Virtual Reality Kit
U.S. consumers think it's extremely unfair that a poor guy with a landline should subsidize the rich guy with the cell phone or the satellite phone. It might cost me $1 a minute to call my neighbor? No thanks!
I agree, that is a good point.
Malaysian plane crashes in Ukraine
Greed! It would not stop here. Today it is Netflix and youtube, tomorrow it will be image heavy sites. Then they will go after google, mail provider and bank sites etc.
I don't think this person "gets" Weird Al's typical album. At the risk of sounding like someone who is a bit too familiar with Al's work, generally speaking the songs Al does fall into five groups:

- Songs about the song they are parodying (like "Smells Like Nirvana")

- Songs that are pitch-perfect parodies of a song but of a completely different subject. (Most of his popular songs, "Eat It" to "Like a Surgeon", etc, etc)

- Songs of their own subject but whose music are parodies (or inspirations of) an artist or genre. ("Mission Statement" on this album seems to be inspired by the hippie acoustic hits of the 60s and 70s, "Germs" was basically a Nine Inch Nails song but none in specific.)

- One-off songs that usually have a gimmick or something but not be overtly attempting to musically parody a specific song, artist, or genre. ("Albuquerque" was a really, really long song, "Lame Claim To Fame" is a running joke about people who point out how they have some N'th degree tangential relationship to someone famous.)

- Each album has a (always incredible) polka track where a dozen or so songs are rapidly parodied as polkas. It's always the one that gets stuck in my head.

The article seems to think the best of Al's work is when he parodies a song into one with commentary on the song itself (or the artist, etc.) But in reality this is a very small sliver of the type of thing Al does, I can probably count on one hand the number of tracks that are akin to "Smells Like Nirvana" where the song is about the band and the song he's parodying. Of course, intellectual wankery is generally drawn to this type of "meta-commentary" just because it's seemingly more complex than a straight up parody, but if you have listened to Al over the years you'll realize the guy is ridiculously talented. Though most of his songs are silly, the range of themes, styles, subject matter, and even his personal vocal range are astounding, nevermind the fact that his band has a pretty brutal touring schedule and have been playing some of these songs for like 20-25 years now. I mean, basically the guy likely takes the chorus of the song he is parodying, comes up with some options that work lyrically, and then has to build a song around that. One track on this album is called "Foil," probably at first because the word works well for the chorus. How many people could then honestly write an entire well-written, entertaining song about foil? Most artists seem to be trapped in their own style, but honestly despite the surface-level silliness aspect to his music he manages to pull off tunes from so many parts of the musical spectrum I'd probably argue he's the most "Renaissance Man" musician out there.
Data Suggests That Over 40% of Happiness is Directly Related to Internet Access
Allow Law Enforcement Officials to remotely control driverless vehicles in emergency cases. There I fixed it.
Because it converts them to be your units. It turns them into "Indian Convert" units that are agricultural producers but useless in manufacturing capacities.

It's a bandaid over frigging slavery.
How to be cool
> [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321601912?tag=contindelive-20

Did you just put your Amazon associates referral code in a link on HN? lol
The Creativity Pill
RT2 is actually my favorite of the group, I just mentioned Railroads! because I wanted to stay on topic.
> Even if automated cars are a win in 99.9% of the cases, the 0.1% of failures (intentional or not) may be devastating.

9/11 proves that we are incapable of handling the 0.01% failure case without going to extremes. Very disheartening.