Perdition

The point is that if debate isn't allowed you aren't likely to have higher quality posters than the average for programmers. And the reality is that there are tons of lazy/stupid programmers out there that just want "plz email teh codez".

The forums that I have seen work best at maintaining abnormally high levels of quality posters are ones where the Q&A is effectively secondary to the debate. The reason is that the fun of debating keeps the high quality posters around and answering shitty/repetitive questions.

Have you seen the kind of damage large birds do to aircraft?

This wouldn't be an issue if we were only talking about upgraded small RC aircraft being used as drones, but some companies are selling much larger drones that are way outside of existing "bird strike" parameters.

You can't have dozens of unregulated news drones the size of a small car flying through the same airspace as rescue choppers.

>Thus the question remains: What kind of policy one exactly wants to base on 'human's irrationality'. And whether it is good to base policy on irrational behavior.

That isn't what people are saying. What people are saying is that Capitalism is predicated upon the notion that people are at least mostly rational actors who act in self-interest, and so a free market will give people what they want. The criticism of Capitalism is that humans are not mostly rational, and regularly don't act in self-interest, and this leads to large amounts of human suffering.

People like Piketty aren't looking to eliminate the disparity between "irrational actors" and "rational actors"^, or to increase the amount of "rational" behaviour, but to eliminate the human suffering that Capitalism is supposed to eliminate if it worked as claimed.

^ Which is not a synonym for "wealthy". What Piketty is talking about is wealth accumulating to the point where the skilled and hard working don't have upward mobility. The hereditarily wealthy don't need to be particularly "rational actors", they just need to not spend their wealth faster than it accumulates.

P.S. Even "rational actors" suffer losses caused by the irrationality of the market.

I think you have missed what people are getting at with "humans are not rational". The argument behind Capitalism is that people will do what is in their self-interest, and more generally will be rational actors, and as such the outcome of the market will reflect what people want.

However, people often act against their self-interest either naturally or because of manipulation, and short term self-interest can conflict with long term self-interest.

A good example of this is "austerity" in hard economic times. When times are bad the reaction of many people is to "tighten their belts" and decrease spending, and in the short term that provides some protection against things like being laid off. However, if large numbers of people start doing this then the amount of economic activity is significantly reduced and those people who reduced their spending now risk being laid off.

No, I am saying that coding will always require some kind of formal expression, and that the difficulty of the grammar used is not the major barrier (as these issues can be dealt with by compilers and IDEs).

Attempts to create "natural" language programming haven't worked because actual natural languages are too informal and imprecise for simple algorithmic comprehension.

A system that can comprehend natural language and turn imprecise specifications into a program should be an AI.

Not really, these companies would be happy to have broken security as long as break ins didn't cost them money.

This is why network security is such a joke, most companies only do enough to mitigate the last disaster instead of designing a system that is actually secure.

See I don't think coding can get any easier for the level of problem we are talking about here. The kind of small problems we seem to be talking about are the kind of thing that is within the realm of "scripting". You don't need a deep understanding of Computer Science or advanced data structures to write good enough code for those problems.

"Coding" will never go away before AI because at some point you need to formally express the design you have thought up. It doesn't really matter if you do that with arcane syntax, symbols, or "natural" language.

Sounds like you need to modularise the problem more, which you are naturally forced to do by the limitations of spreadsheet "programming".

Because that is political reality.

Do you see any armies marching to protect Ukraine's territorial integrity? Russia isn't a small state that can be easily threatened, and nobody in the West has the stomach for a real war. I bet Russia could take all of Ukraine with no response beyond a boycott and some air-strikes.

P.S. The US has done far worse things than what Russia is currently doing in order to keep South America and the Caribbean within their sphere of influence. Small neighbours of great powers seldom get to exercise real independence.

>We need tools that bring the learning curve down and allow people to develop their own basic tools to make their lives easier

This won't achieve much because the issue is that most people can't think about the problems they face in a structured way.

Modern programming isn't hard, all you need to learn is a handful of control structures and how to do I/O, and there are a multitude of tools to take away the tedious bits.

But if you can't describe the problem you are trying to solve in a structured way than no non-AI tool will help.

P.S. I remember being considered a Wizard in a non-technical university course because I looked up some Excel tutorials and built a spreadsheet with some basic calculations and graphing. This wasn't technically hard, but most of my classmates lacked the ability to comprehend the relationships between different cells and tables in Excel.

>Provocation: Letting Ukraine voluntarily choose closer ties with the West

Ukraine should have been quietly told that joining NATO or the EU was not possible.

>Not Provocation: Invading and annexing the Crimea

Strawman: This.

What Russia did is absolutely wrong IMO, but it is expected (just like the US doesn't like anyone else messing with South America or the Caribbean).

>Also, since when is the US State Department in charge of the EU?

The US has been the primary power in Western Europe since the 8th of May 1945. The US can directly control who enters NATO, and wields significant influence over the primary EU members. The possibility of Ukraine joining NATO or the EU would have gone through State and should have been firmly rejected.

EDIT: Downvotes and no replies, I can't tell whether I am on Hacker News or reddit.

Under US law if the interns aren't getting paid then they can't produce IP for the company, because the company is not allowed to directly benefit from unpaid interns.

Leaving a legal trail showing how your company is benefiting from the work of unpaid interns is pants on head retarded.

Operational expenditure is different from capital expenditure.

That is why it is happening. NATO was set-up to counter the Soviets (dominated by Russia) and it is a slap in the face for Russia to allow NATO right on their border when they are trying to become a real world power again.

NATO might have gotten away with limited defence/economic pacts with former Soviet satellites, but full NATO and EU membership was bound to provoke a reaction from Russia.

Apparently the US State Department didn't learn from its arrogance in Iraq, because such blatant provocation shouldn't have been allowed.

I don't see how.

Putin isn't a communist and Western media is widely available in Russia so there is no benefit in regards to information flow in expanding the border. And there is no significant economic difference between Russia and her neighbours, the Soviets were trying to hide the evidence that average people in the West had it better than the new Soviet man.

Putin's actions look much more like those of the 19th century Russian Empire than of the USSR (which never used nationalist rhetoric).

>The question I ask myself is if Moore's law can no longer lead to faster computing, then what good is it?

Smaller and hence lower power chips. You wouldn't get multi-GHz phone CPUs if it wasn't for Moore's law allowing massive reductions in power per cycle. Even on the desktop this is good, my current graphics card is about twice as powerful as the one I bought in 2010 and uses only 1/3rd the power, which means the system fans don't have to run as loud to keep temperatures down.

I don't think mobile devices need much more processing power, but every reduction in power use is good.

The FDR data will still tell them whether it flew (ie pilot commanded) into the water or crashed (ie ran out of fuel or suffered engine failure), whether it had been on autopilot, whether there was an earlier fire that knocked out communication and navigation etc.

There are plenty of events where the CVR provided no useful information and the cause of the crash was determined by the FDR.

Moore's law is only about transistor density, the clock speed race of the 90's mirrored Moore's law but was only indirectly related (in that the smaller you make a circuit the less time a signal needs to propagate through it).

The improvement in GPUs is all in line with Moore's law.

>On top of that, there's been failure to move to distributed and multicore processing outside of GPUs

Few ordinary tasks besides graphics processing benefit significant from multi-threading, and the resulting program complexity means developers don't bother with it for minor improvements.

There are other benefits from the power of modern processors, such as running programs in sandboxes to improve security, and being able to run multiple CPU intense programs on separate cores.

> but when the single fastest increase in my computing in a decade came from installing a 512 GB SSD drive, it means that something went terribly wrong.

No it doesn't, it is just that SSDs cut disk access speeds more in absolute terms than going from 1Ghz to 4Ghz improves program speed. A modern 4Ghz CPU is more than 4 times faster than a 1Ghz early 2000's CPU, but in absolute terms the speed up is small (ie 500 ms to 50 ms is more noticeable than 50 ms to 5 ms).

Try running a CPU bound task (the ordinary user doesn't have these) on a early 2000's CPU compared to a modern CPU.

Even if you took it that way there is still nothing backing this. Finding the best way to implement a dumb policy does not mean the overall policy is backed by a good argument.

Even if this was the most cost-effective life saving measure the NHTSA could implement, it still doesn't mean it is the most cost-effective life saving measure that government could take.

The issue with "random" passwords is trying to remember them. XKCD-style isn't perfect, but it is loads better than "Password91" and "Dragon" style passwords which are what most people actually use.

I was talking about their statements, not information buried in a report the public won't read. You think people would approve of this rule if the NHTSA had of worked, "Based on the aforementioned revised estimates for costs and benefits, the net cost per equivalent life saved for rear visibility systems meeting the requirements of today’s final rule ranges from $15.9 to $26.3 million.", into their public statement?

If you actually read the report it is clear this has nothing to do with rear-vision camera systems being cost effective and is just about the NHTSA doing what they are told by congress.

>"Throughout this rulemaking process, the agency has been sensitive to the costs of today’s rule and has sought to ensure that the requirements adopted impose the least amount of regulatory burden on the economy while still achieving Congress’ goal of reducing fatalities and injuries resulting from backover crashes."

And hyperion2010 was right, having a rear-vision system doesn't mean you will use it (where I live it is illegal to use them when actually reversing). The solution to these accidents is education.

Technology is often the answer to human stupidity, but not at $15.9 to $26.3 million per life saved.

I have been joking with my friends that Obama called up Putin and told him to put on a side-show.

Because his statement was not loaded with emotion like the one from the NHTSA.

>""We are committed to protecting the most vulnerable victims of back-over accidents — our children and seniors," Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement."

This rule doesn't pass the "sniff" test. There is absolutely nothing backing this except an estimate that several dozen lives might be saved. No cost effectiveness analysis, no comparison to other changes.

It is also legally yours if you use it and no one challenges for a long period of time. Trademarks are based on use.

Massive corporate behemoths have lost local TM use because some mom-and-pop store was using a trademark first.

The issue with child support is that the state child support agencies often rely on bureau of labor figures to determine what someone with a particular job "should" be making, and don't consider variance in wages or cost of living when levying child support rates. So while the payments might be reasonable according to some bureaucrats rule book, they aren't reasonable in the real world (a common issue is men with large child support obligations wanting to start another family).

There have been numerous cases of actors whose child support obligations were set at the peak of their career and yet the CSA still expects them to be making the same money.

Ethics committees take all the fun out of science.

Not everyone here is American.

The US is just as much a direct threat to my countries economic interests as China. A pity my countries politicians are in Washington's pockets and are silent now when only two years ago they were yammering about the threat from Chinese government hackers and Huawei.

>There is obviously nothing in your home about which you fear your neighbours finding out. Not everyone is in that category.

Or the risk of what the police might do if unrecorded outweighs the neighbours gossiping.

Also in suburbia it is my experience that neighbours can hear what is being sad in a domestic anyway. Drywall doesn't muffle yelling much.

The import and sale to civilians of new automatic weapons has been banned in the US since 1986. Very few rednecks own automatic weapons.

That does sound like Jobs. He might have been an asshole but he knew how to handle engineers.