danblick

Would it not be easier to launch a camera of some kind? Or are cameras in on the conspiracy somehow?

Fwiw there was https://www.wired.com/2017/04/detroit-stomping-silicon-valle...

But who knows what to make of that

Nice references! Might be better to start with the cost paid by the customer to Uber rather than just the driver's cut of it?

"In San Francisco the fare is $2.20 plus $0.26 per minute plus $1.30 per mile. In New York City the fare is $3 plus $0.40 per minute plus $2.15 per mile."

Lousy, snobbish article. Blames innovators for changing the world. So? What does the author suggest could have been done differently? Perhaps the author could draw on his elite liberal arts education to reflect on the history of planned (as opposed to unplanned) social change? (The record there is not so hot.)

There was one in an Economist article about this a few months ago:

https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/217286...

I think you're being too dismissive.

What makes you think that with a large library of genomic data (only recently available) and a large corresponding library of quantified facial measurements you wouldn't be able to build a useful predictive model?

I'm sure it's not perfect but I wouldn't be so quick to say it's impossible. (The science is being developed by Craig Venter, who may be a jerk but he's often been a jerk at interesting frontiers in science.)

https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/217286...

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608813/does-your-genome-p...

In support of your argument though, I think it would very hard to build a model that was precise enough to distinguish two people who already look alike.

(You probably couldn't use these generated facial predictions to pull a single individual out of a database of photos.)

"Then the fish came alive, with his death in him, and rose high out of the water showing all his great length and width and all his power and his beauty. He seemed to hang in the air above the old man in the skiff. Then he fell into the water with a crash that sent spray over the old man and over all of the skiff."

I'll miss the option of visiting techshop to take a welding class or use a laser cutter, but it's not like it's the last makerspace even in the bay area...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Techshop/comments/7d7e0m/san_franci...

> Thiel owns that attorney.

Maybe, but that sounds like a pretty big logical leap.

There is a book called "Vision Science" (by Stephen Palmer) that is full of interesting stuff about how the brain interprets visual information.

One thing I liked (there were lots): you probably know that your eyes move around with jerky motions called saccades. But if our eyes move in jerks, why don't we observe motion blur (like a camera would have) while our eyes are moving? It's not that our eyes aren't affected by motion blur: the answer is that our brains are wired so that when our eyes are moving, we don't really see anything at all. You just kind of discard the input you get while your eyes are jumping around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking

It's been ~8 years since I read it, but I think "The Sciences of the Artificial" by Herb Simon might make my list. It's about design, engineering, intelligence (artificial or human), and building things.

If the US had been the first to launch a satellite, would the Soviet Union have objected to the principle that satellites can fly over foreign countries without permission?

I read this was kind of a consideration during the Eisenhower era and one reason the US didn't push so quickly to space.

Volatility in cryptocurrency-based securities? I am shocked, shocked.

That's not really fair. I care about making sure people are able to vote, too. I expressed a concern about election security because I think it's an issue people should give more thought. It's not fair to suggest that means I don't care about the same things you do too.

Let's take as a starting point this list of methods:

http://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/heritage-explains...

(I realize that's from the Heritage Foundation - I'm not particularly conservative - it's just the first decent list I came across while Googling.)

Let's take these 3:

""" False registrations: Voting under fraudulent voter registrations that either use a phony name and a real or fake address or claim residence in a particular jurisdiction where the registered voter does not actually live and is not entitled to vote.

Duplicate voting: Registering in multiple locations and voting in the same election in more than one jurisdiction or state.

Fraudulent use of absentee ballots: Requesting absentee ballots and voting without the knowledge of the actual voter; or obtaining the absentee ballot from a voter and either filling it in directly and forging the voter’s signature or illegally telling the voter who to vote for. """

Ok. Pretend I am a hostile nation-state. I can find a list of registered voters online (from some hack, because in 2020 PII is everywhere). I identify a number of key districts in the upcoming US election, and the names of some individuals living in those districts. I acquire some mail-in ballots, and cast votes using those names and details (say, SSNs). I'll just ignore whether or not the person has already voted. (To summarize: my hypothetical attack uses methods (2) Duplicate voting and (3) Fraudulent use of absentee ballots above, not actually method (1) False registrations.)

Is that so hard to imagine doing? I don't think so: particularly not for a nation state.

"Voter fraud" can be when a particular person votes twice in an election -- that's possible but not worth the risk for the individual. In this scenario there's not much real risk to whoever is carrying out the attack.

It doesn't even really matter if you get "caught" (detected). (Getting "caught" (punished) is hard to imagine.) The goal is just to undermine the election. To win, all you have to do is throw the result into doubt.

Are you saying, "prove it has happened" or "prove it is a risk"? I doubt it's happened yet, but I think the risk is getting worse every year (technology enables this, like when personal identifying information on large numbers of American voters leak from large companies...)

In the US, there's a lot of concern about making it easy for voters to register and stay registered, because in the past officials used this to disenfranchise blacks in the south and minority groups.

I think they are not paying enough attention to the risk of intentional voter fraud (by hostile outsiders) in the modern world. In the last election, Russian election manipulation became a big topic because they hacked e-mail servers and placed some fake news ads. Can you imagine what it would have done to the country if they had actually placed fraudulent votes in key districts? Would you have accepted Donald Trump as president if there had been serious questions about whether he'd been elected by fraudulent votes? This is not really that hard to imagine!

The system today is pretty vulnerable to manipulation by outsiders, and the discussion about voter disenfranchisement is keeping us from fixing that...

People sometimes ask on HN about good books on implementing programming languages.

One of the best textbooks I know on type theory is also a pretty good book for getting a programming language up and running: Types and Programming Languages by Ben Pierce.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/types-and-programming-languag...

The book starts off implementing the untyped lambda calculus and then adds more and more interesting kinds of types. There's a tarball somewhere on the course website that has all the code from the book, and it's kind of fun to play with all the systems it covers.

I'm confused; isn't the solution to this problem "gcc -M"?

IMHO it's fun to think about the economics of autonomous vehicles. For example, here's a neat article on "second order effects" of electric and autonomous cars [1]. (examples: Increased use of autonomous cars could mean less space lost to parking lots in cities. Higher utilization for cars could mean faster turnover (~3 years/car instead of ~10).)

One thing to think about: autonomous cars might make a big difference for car-sharing services or trucking, but they're less essential when you're driving the car yourself and parking in your garage. I think traditional cars will be around for a while. (Particularly in lower-density areas where there's less demand for ride-sharing services.) This article [2] suggests regular cars may be around until 2050 or so:

"According to IHS, a firm that provides automotive forecasts and insights, sales of autonomous cars, including driver control, will begin by 2025 and could reach 11.8 million in 2035; sometime after 2050, says IHS, almost all vehicles will be autonomous."

So your hobby is probably good for another 30 years at least?

[1] http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-and-second...

[2] http://senseable.mit.edu/papers/pdf/20150803_Claudel_Ratti_F...

Okay but that might be a little simplistic, because automation can also complement manual labor and create more demand for it.

The example that comes to mind is about ATMs and bank teller jobs: when ATMs were introduced it actually increased the number of teller jobs because branch offices became cheaper and banks opened more of them.

Discussed in:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.htm...

I believe your question is "it shows Obama, so what?", is that right?

Sending humans to Mars seems less attractive to me than sending robots to Ceres. Is there an argument for Mars that doesn't include the phrase "multi-planet species"?

"Doing what you do to seek for what you desire is like climbing a tree to seek for fish." - Mencius

Coding interviews test for skills that aren't really the same skills you need to do well as a software engineer. I'm surprised the industry hasn't found any better way to evaluate job candidates yet, given how much is at stake.

> Silicon Valley already does have its version of frats: companies.

Ew, no. Work-life balance?

I think you are conflating "blockchain" with "electronic payment". I can use my Visa card without needing a blockchain. And banks will settle the payment electronically without ever moving paper money.

"No Timmy, I was not paid with paper money even in the 1990s."

Or Frederic Bastiat's "Candlemaker's Petition", which was a satirical request that officials block out the sun in order "to encourage industry and stimulate employment".

http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html

I've been thinking a little about the economics of self driving cars and it seems to make sense that they'd seek a partnership with a ride sharing service. While I guess the eventual goal could be "a self driving car in every garage", you'd probably pay for more for one if (1) you're using it all the time (high utilization), and (2) it introduces some other kind of savings (like not having to pay a driver). Consumers have neither really but taxi/trucking companies would have both. I guess it's a question of how much the hardware is really going to cost. Does anybody know of publications that talk about the economics here?

Have you seen farmbot.io?

For those interested in this topic I might recommend Tim Wu's books "The Master Switch" or "The Attention Merchants". "The Master Switch" in particular is about the history of communications industries in the US and how the organization of those industries affected free speech. (Of particular interest: Bell had a government-supported monopoly for about 70 years, in part because people thought of monopoly differently in 1900 than in 1970.)

I read that Tim is also responsible for coining the term "net neutrality".