skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always wondered if it was possible to have a dedicated autonomous car lane on the highway, similar to a HOV lane. To get on, you would park your car at a designated area. The computer would start to sync with all the other cars traveling in the lane, and it would take off and just add itself to the caravan of cars. You could go to sleep or do whatever else you wanted. When you reached your destination exit, the car would park itself again and wait for you to resume control of the car for the local streets.

You still have to deal with things mentioned in the article: random objects on the road, rain, sunlight, human driven cars crashing into your lane. But I think that's more manageable then having to deal with humans crossing the street, stop signs and traffic signals, random road changes in the middle of the night.
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All the effort is spent for safety. But is it worth it? The fully autonomous approach may never make Google's self-driving car economically viable to reach the same level of human driving safety. Note that humans are actually decent drivers. WHO reports 7.6 road fatalities per billion vehicle km in the US. Now Google's self-driving car has reached 1 million km, and that's under ideal conditions and human monitoring. If it wants proper validation of the safety of autonomous driving, it requires at least several billion miles of driving, which would cost much much more than a lot of low hanging fruits of improvement at driving safety (autobraking, obstacle radar, auto lane keeping etc).

Now that you can see a slow version of self-driving car already out there with 25 mph top speed and impossible to cause serious injury in the first place. This might be the future of self-driving cars, to provide accessibility and enable those who can't drive.
But information isn't a taxable item, since it's not a monetary amount. It would be like taxing electricity. You can tax the money you pay for it, but not the information itself.

You're not using your education to generate data. Most of the data is made by other people's education and then multiplied many times. Even for cases where you do create information, like in your comment, many magnitudes more data was sent over your line to get it before my eyes. If they wanted to tax new information, they wouldn't do it through a flat fee per GB.

Sales tax is a tax on a monetary exchange. You tax the price you pay for your shoes, you don't tax "$3 per shoe". The point of that is taxing value rather than quantity. How you use the tax money it is irrelevant to how you acquire it.

And last but not least: we're already drowning in 'pointless data'. A lot of the internet's capacity is used to transfer scripts and styles rather than real information. Whether you consider that pointless is a different matter, but it's not up to the government to say what you should consider pointless data and what you shouldn't.
You are not a lottery ticket – you’re an underpriced option
Think ahead, think Streets Ahead
A team of 16 and 17 year olds from King's Lynn, Norfolk taking part in the National Citizen Service [http://www.ncsyes.co.uk/] decided to work with Guide Dogs to raise awareness about the problems of street clutter and pavement parking
A lot of toll highways in Spain are severely underused and basically bankrupt. They definitely could devote a whole lane to autonomous cars.
Dora the Exploler – Full Games Episodes for Children || 2014
A p-value of 0.04 is not very strong evidence of an effect, though it is significant at the 0.05 level. This study says at most that the effect should continue to be studied.
The main point is still valid. In an emergency situation, as long as a self driving car has to choose between hitting a ball and a kid chasing after it, or a woman and a shopping cart, or a laid down motorcycle and its rider, and not know which is which, there is no way these cars can be deployed in mass. And this is an extremely hard problem.
I use a similar construct for managing config files (mostly the stuff that goes to /etc/*): put all the config for a specific program (or problem) into a VCS-handled directory, then add a Makefile with an "install" target that copies everything into its place. Using GNU install (instead of ln or cp) allows for copying files (and creating directories) with fine control about permissions and ownership.

This can also be done recursively: toplevel Makefile for a machine's configuration files calls the sub-makefiles that install apache, asterisk, openvpn configurations etc.
Six Steps for Rigorous Formative Assessment
An Uber driver attacked a passenger with a hammer. Another driver ran over some people. Neither of these events have had any appreciable effect on Uber.

T'll be interestin to see how the public reacts when a Google autonomous car kills someone.

And so many people currently use Google services I wouldn't be surprised if people have already died as a result of something Google has done.
exactly, more power to projectmeshnet.org and serval. they can always resurrect fidonet, it's still in use in Ukraine and Russia. host mirrors of the most popular resources, wikipedia, imdb, gem, apt and git repository's just like in the bbs & ftp days. use goldbug for mail and chat, yacy for a veronica like meshspace search engine and twister and tribbler for p2p blogging and vlogging.
Something in this vein--or some other variant of autonomous cars driving on (relatively) predictable limited access highways--seems a much more achievable goal for, say, the next decade than general purpose autonomy. As you say, there are still obstacles to overcome to which I'd add legal and regulatory concerns. I sure don't want a car for which I'm liable if it makes a "mistake."

The general purpose robo-taxi will almost certainly happen someday but I'd be more likely to bet on fifty years than ten.
>In a sense, if they gave you free education and you used that education to create new information, then they own a certain stake in it.

What?! Does that mean the local water company owns a stake as well? I mean, I couldn't have possibly survived to receive that education without a source of clean water, right?

And what about the people who didn't receive a state-supported education (ie, private schools and home schooling). Are they exempt from this tax of yours?
"Fun" fact: the reason why internet is cheap / fast is because of the webcam industry in Romania.
Also the regular Army survival guide

http://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-05-70.pdf
Apple Pay Secure? Not So Fast
What a nice testbed too. Google should leverage this kind of failed states.
It's almost of no consequence. Assuming the regular cars can do the data collection necessary, the first 10 times a road is driven on might need to be manual but from there, enough data about that road has probably been collected to make it autonomous from that point on. It's still an amazing technology.
This does my head in at word. I write the database that the place runs on and the solution to anything to interact with the database is "another Excel to...". They don't seem to appreciate what a backward way of doing thing s this is, when you could have a proper web form, with half of the data filled automatically and proper data validation and error messages.
Show HN: Fiddlewax Pro v1.1
I know, right? This here is a classic example of a nail, so why wouldn't I use my trusty hammer..
Thanks for the more clear explanation. However, just because a law is abused by some women, does not mean "there is hardly any problem of dowry" - you are making a logical jump here. Also, the supreme court isn't important here; they're just quoting statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau. (Does 1,97,762 mean 197k or are we a missing a number here?) Last time I heard there were about 9k dowry-related deaths (also from the NCRB); you'd expect the incidence of non-fatal violence would be higher, but I don't know numbers for that. Regarding the "ongoing campaign" I saw things a while back, possibly it was "Say No To Dowry", and there are others just from a quick web search. I am not a researcher in this area, and perhaps western media is more biased around this topic. But you're not making any good arguments against it.

Regarding your links about feminism, [1] is not relevant to India, [2] is you being very lazy - I'm not going to read through 400 pages just to entertain your whims, you will need to quote specific extracts from it, and [3] is fairly neutral regarding feminists.

You also seem to getting offended personally that I am pointing out problems with your country. I don't know what to do, other than point out that this reaction is not rational, and that I don't mean personal offence.
A Deeper Look at Apple’s HealthKit
I started less than a month ago, and it pays really well. I will stick it out and hope to convince management to let me have admin rights to my machine.
This in itself is revolutionary. If we could rid ourselves of just manual freeway driving, that's a huge step forward.

Park your car, put the seats down and go to sleep. Wake up in the morning and find yourself halfway across the United States.
For a chap interested in the law, you seem to be rather flexible in your perspective.

An unlocked door on a house doesn't seem to support an objectively reasonable expectation of security, but that doesn't mean it's any less wrong to open it and burgle the place. And I doubt the fact of an unlocked door or window would be supported as a defence in a burglary case.

Data stored with cloud companies are accessible, as though through an open door, for those companies' employees. But that doesn't make it any less wrong for such employees to go trawling for gossip, amateur porn, etc. in such private messages.
Why wouldn't you chose to spend the money on improving public transport instead?
The Internet, while most of us don't care, has negative externalities as well:

- killing hundreds of thousands of businesses such as bookstores, movie rental stores, record stores;
- makes it possible through IP telephony, email, the web, collaboration tools etc. to outsource millions of jobs;
- is a time consumer like no other before;

Yes, the Internet creates businesses as well but I don't think I've ever used a Hungarian Internet business. Also, the outsourced jobs go mainly to Asia. I could see why a conservative government would tax the Internet.
The ultimate SEO 2.0 guide
world of warcraft ?
Remember that more than half of Google are not Engineers.
I think unit tests are overrated. No, not because testing is overrated, but because unit tests aren't the only way you can test software. QuickCheck for Haskell is a fuzzy testing library, for example.
I'm not so sure about that. Source: I'm Romanian. The best and most accurate explanation that I could find after a quick search was this one: http://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/2ct58s/average_intern...

"""
tl;dr Romanians love movies, we needed a way to download them and fiber was the answer. Much cheaper than copper, no risk of the cables getting stolen.
"""
The tiny bit of tech support I did: people who had no clue were easy to support. The kids who had installed Linux and thus thought they were proficient enough to manage their machines were a problem.

This was 2001 and everythig was relaxed and pretty open. It wasn't hard to get the software you needed. But that one guy installed Kazaa - bamn, that machine got wiped and re-installed. Another guy brought in a game on 3.5" floppies to play on the pick and place machine - bamn, that machine got wiped by them trying to cover it up, leaving a gently tricky recovery procdure for me to recover all the unbacked up P&P program data.

People who don't know anything about computers might take a few extra clicks to get to what they need but they tend not to break things too badly.
The second chapter "High-Dimensional Space" talks about the problem of spikey spheres[0] (how most of the mass is near the surface), I made an ipython notebook to illustrate it[1].

[0] http://www.penzba.co.uk/cgi-bin/PvsNP.py?SpikeySpheres

[1] http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/gist.github.com/SnippyHollo...
Retina tool to make websites ready for HDPI
> every high school already requires a $100 graphing calculator

I can't help but feel this is a historical aberration, and one that is bound to correct itself eventually. The reason it's so entrenched at the moment is, I imagine, standardisation--which is why a custom raspberry pi solution would not be suitable.

As an side, I'm not entirely sure why a graphing calculator is even required anyway. I never used one once in my entire school curriculum, and don't feel like I suffered for it. Being able to plot a function by hand is something of a skill in its own right because it teaches you the analytical tools to be able to learn how a function behaves, and as long as the teacher knows the correct solution there's nothing to be gained from every individual student having their own calculator.
When I started at Google I was immediately impressed by the way IT is managed.

Need a new mouse or keyboard? Go and grab one from a nearby tech stop. No need to ask, just swipe your badge and take it. Need something more esoteric? File a ticket and they'll make it happen. I've never had an equipment request denied at Google. The worst that's happened is I've had to wait a few weeks for a particular item to come in stock.
In an emergency situation, just stop. Don't hit the ball or the kid. Let the human take over, or wait for the emergency to pass. The car will break faster than a human could. If the car can't drive itself safely in a given situation, make humans drive.

There are valid points to be made about liability and legal concerns, increases in road congestion, etc. But technical considerations are not really an issue.

You don't need to completely solve all potential problems before entering the market. You just need to provide enough value.

If you've got an hour commute over highways every day, even being able to do highway driving automatically will be a huge win.
Pay-per-gigabyte: Hungary wants to levy tax on Internet usage
I'm starting to see a trend in Google PR.

I've read the latest book from Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, where the main argument is "we are the best because we have the smartest people on the planet working for us". That's the main point to explain many of the things that they do.

This article seems on the same line.
I for one don't trust myself with that judgement call either (given the expected very short timeframe you have available).

For example, avoiding the kid that appears out of no where might crash me into an upcoming car, killing that driver while the kid in the corner of my eye turned out to be a dog or in fact stopped/retreated just in time to prevent a collision in the first place. Your fastest reflexes bypass a big part of your brain.

As long as the cars drive safer, on average, than we do (and I think that's achievable), rationally we should hand over the controls (or we should find a way to combine both and end up even safer).
Flight 1: http://youtu.be/0a_00nJ_Y88

Flight 2: http://youtu.be/YMvQsmLv44o

Flight 3: http://youtu.be/Qz0yJ8N3cA0
> If it wants proper validation of the safety of autonomous driving, it requires at least several billion miles of driving

No, it doesn't, the same way we don't need decades of testing to build an edifice or centuries of flying to test an airplane. Actually, as every human driver is literally a different person, by your logic we would need driving tests enduring several billion miles.

We can make tests using the worst situations, corner cases and even simulated accidents to see how the driving AI reacts. The problem is hard, but engineering is a finer art than what you imply.
Here's links to more detailed info about Fiddlewax Pro.

Overview: https://fiddlewax.com/pro

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wx1tDcC_zM

Audio: https://soundcloud.com/adam-kumpf/sets

Walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMASFk1ksOM

Guide Book: http://news.fiddlewax.com/post/94051722909/proguide
The problem is not necessarily directly the tax, but the barriers and bureaucracy around it making the whole industry less dynamic. $4 per household is not in itself terrible. The cronyism is also a concern.

The reason policies like this are viable politically is because public policy economists are far more comfortable estimating the direct effects of a tax than they are estimating some of the murkier, but nonetheless inevitable implications. 1st year microeconomics students learn to draw the supply and demand curves, draw in the price after tax and calculate lost consumer surplus and profits. It's core economics material.
10 Steps for a Productive Workweek
What are his chances of staying out of jail when/if he relinquishes power?
> I don't think I've ever used a Hungarian Internet business

There are a couple of successful ones though - Ustream is quite widely used, so is LogMeIn or LiveJasmin (webcam porn).
That's really beside the point. We're not talking about paying them to work there every day. We're talking about paying them for one day as a trial, then deciding on whether they should be an employee or not.
Did I miss something? They were talking about seed rounds raising on the order of a couple of million dollars.

I thought seed rounds raised a couple of hundred thousand (at valuations of a couple of million), with series A rounds at about ten times those numbers.

Have things changed, or were they talking about valuations rather than the amounts raised?
Linux Systems Administrator – Oslo, Norway
Show HN: CongressWhat.com, know your congress people, elections are almost here
CTwittLike – See Twitter like someone else
UK Wind farms outstrip nuclear power
You can also get in the habit of questioning every thought you have. Which is somewhat madness, and can be a very hard habit to break. Making decisions and choices is a tediously slow and cautious process. Building methods of thinking without deconstructing them before they are built, is also very difficult. You don't have to not think, you just have to be skeptical of your own thoughts.

It's not perfect, but neither is the process of building a sequence of associative correlations and calling it common sense.
I really think EU/NATO/US should step up covert and intelligence activities to overthrow the Hungarian government. A backwards and evil regime that has taken over Hungary should not be permitted to exist in the heart of Europe.
Road fatalities are probably also that way because of the cars themselves (crash-tested and with airbags and all), emergency infrastructure (ambulances and medical care) and the relatively high number of 'easy' kilometers (highways). The European average is 13.

But shouldn't we also look at injuries, both physically and mentally, and perhaps even material damage? That probably gives a much higher resolution to compare those 1M km's from Google with.
what you're referring to as 250USD/mo is basically unemployment benefits. i've got no idea where you got $650/mo from though.

-the minimum wage in hungary is actually 328 EUR (~430 USD) / month in 2014

https://www.google.hu/search?q=minimum+wage+in+hungary

-the average wage in hungary for full-time employed people was actually ~975USD / month in the first half of 2014.

http://www.vg.hu/gazdasag/makrogazdasag/ennyi-az-atlagber-ma...
Future fracturing of the internet: How access will define the web of tomorrow
How Big Pharma Undermined Medical Innovation for Financial Gain
Apple's Secret Weapon
Nestify has become a word to rival Uberization for the IoT industry
A very good resource are Thomas Kuhn's interviews with Dirac [1]. He talked about his childhood (they barely spoke anything at home, because they had to talk in French...), his university studies and his findings. It is quite long but worth it!

[1] http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4575_1.html
I hear this fairly often from php developers, but isn't a large part of it just wordpress/mediawiki/other installations?
in terms of buying products from alibaba, most equipment on their uses the MTK tool chain. MTK offers full drivers to run most of their hardware, and can run under a multitude of Android OS is. I also have a friend who took the MTK tool chain and installed debian on his HaiPai Noble N7889 phone. It didn't run very well at all, but it did run.
Relevant quotes:

* The energy network operator said it was caused by a combination of high winds and faults in nuclear plants.
* The situation is caused by windy conditions boosting the output from turbines at a time when eight out of the UK's 15 nuclear reactors are offline.

Wind power is a helpful boost, but it's not fair to say it outstrips nuclear when it's only for small specific periods of time with high wind, when half the nuclear plants are down for maintenance.
There are some advantages to thinking this way. You get replay functionality "for free" (even if you never expose this to users, it makes debugging much easier), and it becomes much easier to think about how the game will work in a network situation (where each client has its own "copy" of the world, and the two copies might be "out of sync"). I've written initially-imperative games that became more and more functional as I started to debug network problems.
OpenXava 5.1: Rapid Development for Java
TL;DR: BitTorrent being the reason doesn't sound so interesting for a Vice article.

As a person who helped build a "district ISP network" back in the early 2000s, I can tell you that that reason is just some Vice.com style linkbait.

Romania has great Internet speeds because the authorities tolerated us installing cables all over the darn place. Back then it wasn't uncommon to have almost half a dozen ISPs in a one square mile neighbourhood, all offering 50-100 mbps in the city and 1-2 mbps actual Internet speeds, without any FUP.

We were almost the same age and people didn't care about the low international speeds because we could all share movies and music at 50+ mbps (and 0.5 mbps was more than enough for browsing).

This was happening way before the video chat industry took off. Also, for that kind of stuff you need good sustained upload, but the ISPs are still limiting the upload speed to around 30 mbps even for gigabit connections. This doesn't affect BitTorrent (which can be left open over night).
Rather than Real Time Strategy games, maybe consider Turn Based Strategy games.

I often play Advance Wars Dual Strike on an emulator on my phone with one hand when standing on public transport.
Not only that, they took a lot of money in exchange for that "free" eduction -- often from people who didn't even use the service. So no, they don't have a "stake" in the products of anyone's mind. That's repugnant.
Thanks you for this. That means that in the original wording:

>Last month, NASA said it would pay SpaceX its largest single contract ever, $2.6 billion

The word "its" is an ambiguous pronoun - those who read it to mean "NASA" are left confused, since it seems like NASA just went around awarding even larger contracts. In fact, I think it's not only ambiguous, but in the most obvious interpretation of that sentence, it does indeed sound like NASA's biggest single awarded contract ever.
It's nice to see bridges being made to corporate. AWS allowing AD auth or Chrome supporting security policies. We might dislike a lot of these technologies but if ever we're to replace them it won't be by a rip and replace, but rather a slow migration.