pak

Cars can currently drive themselves in certain limited environments tracks at specially designated competitions. How long do you think it will be before the country has the physical and legal infrastructure to support general-purpose automated cars?

Two thought experiments: 1) Do you think the general public would support the use of self-driving cars on public streets as they operate today, even after seeing the DARPA results? 2) Do you think the general public would support the use of computers to diagnose cancer without involving human doctors anytime within the next 50 years?

Remember that when [specialized worker X] says their job can't be done by [new technology Y], they aren't just referring to the technology being unable to fulfill the task. There is a whole economic, political and sociological matrix on top of the job market that prevents technology from displacing workers, and certain regulated industries are more sheltered than others. The hospital is probably one of the most insulated working environments for technological advances (just take a poke at any of their EMR systems to see what I mean.)

Please: there ought to be a rule on HN that instead of linking to a popsci re-interpretation of a scientific result, you instead link directly to the paper.

http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/108/108ra113.full

If it is behind a paywall, as it probably is for this paper if you are not at a university, perhaps look around for the least hyperbolic re-interpretation of the paper, and link that instead.

http://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/image-analysis...

Even if you do not have access to the full paper because of the paywall, you should be able to still read the abstract and pick the popsci article that is fairest to what the paper actually says.

Otherwise, this happens: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174 and I really don't like it when HN blindly follows the hivemind in furthering that phenomenon.

Let's examine what the authors actually say.

To directly compare the performance of the C-Path system to pathological grading on the exact same set of images, we applied standard pathological grading criteria to the TMA images used in the C-Path analysis. [...] the pathologist grading the images was blinded from the survival data. Although the C-Path predictions on the NKI data set were strongly associated with survival, the pathologic grade derived from the same TMA images showed no significant association with survival (log-rank P = 0.4), highlighting the difficulty of obtaining accurate prognostic predictions from these small tumor samples.

That's it. They make one remark about it, and do not focus on this at all elsewhere in the paper, because it was not the point of their study and the methodology for this little result is far from robust. Note they used one pathologist to run this little test. Also note that a high p-value is not evidence that the null hypothesis is true--it is quite possible that there is a relationship but the study is underpowered; this is a frequent point of confusion.

Let's please keep scientific statements in context. The original paper says nothing tantamount to computers diagnosing breast cancer more accurately than doctors. It is, principally, about a new morphological feature that the researchers believe is tied more strongly to survival according to their computational model.

If the derivatives market expects the value of the stock to settle downward post-IPO rush, then anybody selling you a put option would charge that expected difference and you still don't make any money.

> That is a very euro-centric, post-modernist way of thinking.

You're right, even the way I defined "social" is too limited. But that irony only helps my point. You cannot define social, but this is precisely what the "social graph" is attempting to do. As soon as you create a definition, people react to it and oftentimes rebel against it. And then you are right back to the drawing board.

I think you're missing his bigger insight, that is, building a social graph is a fundamentally asocial act. And that extends to creating taxonomies, even if they are localized to my concept of socializing. Nobody goes to a party to create a taxonomy.

Being social is all about disorganization, spontaneity, creativity, breaking out of all the stupid taxonomies that we impose on other people and have imposed on us. Trying to organize socialization to the extent that a "social graph" can be created is a profoundly sociopathic act. To push this task on users so that they do all the shoeboxing and tagging and linking, all in the name of "fun," requires some coercive force. It is no surprise that many Facebook users say that they don't really enjoy using it, but they have to. Part of that was the site's smart choice to maintain real names, so that you are always fretting about your online appearance. It's not a "perfectly synced representation of reality," but it is presented as such, almost like your own personal Wikipedia page, and by the laws of social anxiety you are compelled to check up on it! Shoebox, tag, link...

The line about Facebook rarely producing creative or original material really hit home for me. 4chan and SA are creative because they are fundamentally disorganized, and this freedom produces real moments of brilliance (and plenty more of profound stupidity). Facebook and its ilk are like corporate jobs disguised as consumer web products. You are constantly being shuffled from box to box, task to task, and the blinders have to be tightened ever so constantly to keep you from realizing why what you are doing really never will be "fun" in the way that a raucous party is fun.

About those blinders: those are in a big way the "privacy options" that every social network touts. Maciej points out, and I think that it's a salient point, that if everybody was able to see the whole social graph, it would dissolve. That alone should suggest that the social graph is an unnatural concept. Yet there is somebody, the owner of the social network, that can indeed see the entire graph, and there is a whole level of misdirection that they must apply to make this seem completely normal.

Again, maciej said most of this better than I could, so I'm glad he did.

This is a superb post. Social networks, starting especially from the era of the Facebook era, have foisted increasing amounts of doublethink on their users, and it's often difficult to make people realize this and explain the reasons for it being that way. This essay not only lays out good examples of that nagging cognitive dissonance, but then goes on to explain its necessity at both the technical and business levels.

Heh, they must have smelled the current anti-bank sentiment (switch day, etc.) and decided to brand themselves as non-bank as possible.

"Are we a bank?

No."

I wonder how much the domain cost?

It's more funny with TPDSAA because the images look like the fake testimonials you would find in actual advertisements. So there's a meta-ness to it.

For those trying to use the arrow keys to walk around the 3D environment, and finding their browser window tries to scroll instead, WASD seems to also better for me on Chrome.

Thank you. Sometimes I wish journalists writing about scientists were subject to the same peer-review process that scientists are. E.g.,

"One binds to viral double-stranded ribonucleic acid, a type of molecule found in all viruses."

Goddamnit, no it isn't (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus#Baltimore_classification). Some viruses contain DNA, not RNA, in the capsid. The proposed treatment acts on dsRNA made after the virus has entered the cell, and the only hope of it working on DNA viruses is if sufficient dsRNA is produced during transcription of the viral genome (I'm not convinced—the citations for this in Rider's paper are weak).

IDK about you, but I generally have >30 or so windows open at a time. Listing them all in [modifier]-tab would be hard to navigate (by window title?) but having the icons of all the apps is actually kinda manageable.

It goes in circles because computer technologies are bursty. With Win95, managing by window was reasonable because having >10 windows would usually crash the box. That's also why every window was a taskbar entry, as there was actually room for all of them... By WinXP, when virtual memory became more robust and RAM cheaper, you needed to sometimes collapse taskbar buttons by app to make them fit... And now in Win7, it's the default with just big icons. People leave way too many windows open now because closing them is a chore, and people are crappy/lazy memory budgeters. Apple realized this with iOS, and ported some relevant concepts back to Lion--apps should be able to close and restore at any time, and their open-ness is irrelevant to the user. So yeah, that's why we're back to thinking about apps; windows may be what you most often interact with, but they are no longer the mental unit of desktop management. It's now all about task-->app-->windows.

As an aside, let's consider how effed up MDI is, the inconsistencies in window/toolbar management between Win Office apps, and how the Mac "one window per document, palettes appear on app activation" scheme has managed to stay remarkably consistent for over a decade.

As soon as I see "available on all major operating systems" I groan, because of course it seems to be a Java app. The user experience for Cocoa apps on OS X blows away that of a Java app. The reason Sequel Pro is great is because it feels like a first-rate Mac app and seamlessly fits in with everything else.

You can make a Java app feel almost native on OS X, like with Cyberduck, but it is really, really hard and you have to prioritize that target in your design. Then what happens, as seen with Cyberduck, is the Mac version coming out pretty good and the Windows version feeling a little "off."

Exactly. I think the statement "Linux users are power users," which is the premise underlying most of the OP, is too narrow-minded. The whole spirit of GNU/Linux is that anybody who wants to use it, can do so without restriction--power user, developer, third-world student, hacker, artist. That ethos is primary to any claim that Linux has to follow Unix philosophies or any particular UI guidelines. And it is exactly what has spawned and continues to nurture a healthy diversity of distros. Just because Ubuntu has gone in one direction means very little for Linux as a whole; some would argue that their direction is an important one, and time will tell. Certainly the work that Canonical does on usability and basics like driver support will be available for other distros to cherry pick as appropriate. The blunt answer to the OP is "if Canonical no longer serves your needs, just install one of the hundreds of other distros."

I wouldn't try to make any comment on the overall value of his research, and I am sure his academic writing is much more rigorous. But I really think these "universal secrets of the mind" books, written for a general audience, go too far in clouding original and critical thought by presenting such a slick, skewed narrative. They're sold as guides to better thinking but wind up inducing the opposite. It feels dishonest.

Yet another entry in the long list of pop psychology books. It seems like they all gear up on one or two navel-gazing insights that just about anybody can intuitively identify with (You have a slow, rational side and a fast, emotional side! Doesn't that explain everything?) and then, they try to run as far as they can with the implications of this overly dumbed-down hypothesis. Carefully cherry-picked statistics from the millions of social phenomena and psychological experiments taking place around the world are sprinkled into the narrative to keep you engaged. (side rant: all of which have their methodological details conveniently obscured to prevent your critical thinking from kicking in, and you are extremely lucky if the sample size is provided, much less any attempt at a p-value or other discussion of statistical significance. Nope, it's usually just "Amazingly enough, 89% of ...")

Example: the silly birdie vs. bogie data presented in this little article. Great, people want birdies more than they don't want bogies, and perhaps it ties back into some aspect of your central hypothesis. But how many other oversimplified statements about human nature could I "prove" with this example? Probably hundreds. Maybe it's a completely rational strategy on the part of the golfer, since their experience has taught them that the (emotional|physical|mental) effort required to sink a birdie putt is not as productive in the long-term as at least making par on every hole. That kind of alternative thinking doesn't matter though, so we simply move to the next experiment and supportive conclusion. Repeat ad infinitum, until we've fulfilled the length requirement for a novel.

No, I did not enjoy Freakonomics (can you tell?).

Anybody just get a severe jolt of the Uncanny Valley effect?

If you believe in the Peter Principle, you might be interested in the Gervais Principle (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/) which uses characters from The Office to wax philosophical about organizational structure. At the very least, the first part is worth a read. It diverges from the Peter Principle in a number of thought-provoking ways.

Very cool game spec. One thought: your ants are basically telepathic, so they are able to share information instantly--e.g., the squares they see flow back to your "master bot" which can instantly use this information in the current turn for every other ant. I wonder how much more challenging it would be if you had to build not a "master bot" that controls all ants, but a "bot" that runs for each ant, and they have their own individual inputs and state and can perhaps transmit messages to other ants within a 3 block radius. Maybe they can even lay down pheromones to mark territory... (too much SimAnt as a kid, can you tell?)

Certainly it would be more realistic, and I think even more fun--but maybe a little taxing on the server. But this is run by Google, right? Maybe next year.

Of course, these are all examples of piping the body of an HTTP GET response. There is no parsing going on. You'd need to parse the HTML to translate the links, if this is being served from your own webserver. If you're trying to mirror actual content, wget -r might be a better tool (and can translate the URLs).

arguably, in PHP

    echo file_get_contents('http://www.gun.io')

you lose even more of the line noise of the other languages.

For a language that claims to be "batteries included" it amazes me how many Python tutorials begin with "go get and install this or that package..." How much of the Python standard library is no longer the "Pythonic" way of doing standard things? Why aren't APIs with more refined design, like Requests, pushed back into the standard library, and made the real one way to do it?

Well, OK, you'd have the problem of redundant libraries starting to stack up--it's already looking tiresome. For instance, Requests would have to be urllib3, since there is already a urllib2 and urllib. This article wants me to install simplejson, but there's already a Python json module: oh I see, it was merged in from simplejson, and now they are developed in parallel, so using simplejson may still be better, wtf? Why is there an htmllib in the standard library if I'm always going to use lxml instead? Let's not even discuss eyesores like the heritage of the subprocess and threading libraries...

Putting aside the whole issue of delegating trust via certificates, the simpler answer is that encryption is hard, and thereby expensive. For many purposes, both service provider and client continue to consider it an unnecessary expense.

Only recently, with the spread of wireless networks, has the threat of en masse MITM and eavesdropping attacks become realistic. For a long time, it took serious knowledge to pull these things off on a wired LAN or within the walls of an ISP.

You could say the same about phone calls--why isn't the POTS network encrypted?--but that's because it's well constrained within wires run by trusted people and such cost is not justifiable; but with the advent of cell phones, protocols like GSM had encryption built into them, since telcos couldn't ignore that data sent over the air is readily captured and manipulated.

OK, I get your point, but transcribing e.e. cummings poems is kind of a corner case for voice recognition, no?

What Siri is going to test is whether the 80/20 rule applies to a voice recognition based personal assistant. By constraining it to assistant-type tasks, and with what seems to be the most intelligent design we've seen yet, it has a better shot of achieving it than anything else out there. Previous entrants have been tripped up by the lack of a decent UX, failure to integrate with other data sources, or any number of shortcomings in the long chain from microphone to software back to speaker. Apple is the first company to have such precise control over every component in that chain. (For instance, I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason Siri is 4S-only is because hardware has been added for smarter noise or echo cancellation, or other subtle design changes.) And the fact that it can learn from the internet, and presumably submit its training data back to the cloud, means that maybe it will eventually be able to handle not just 80%, but 90% or 99% of total inputs.

You are absolutely correct.

The dozen or so hackers in this thread that expect that "security vulnerability" is some magic keyword that gets you talking to the head technical honcho of the security group have probably never answered phone calls for a big company. Phone support for somebody like AmEx is a huge burden of cost and manpower; the structure of the tree has been set firmly in place since the 1980's to take care of the most common 90% of issues using the least-paid person available. I'm sorry, if you're in the long tail you will just have to expect to wait extra. That goes double if you are not a cardmember (read: paying customer).

I am surprised that the above person in Australia got through at all, and that the CSR had latitude to try to spend time replicating the issue. In my opinion, for a credit card company, 20 minutes and a positive conclusion for a matter as rare as reporting a webapp vulnerability is a success.

Sure, none of you should be thrilled about the situation because as technically-oriented people with generous motives the system is not set up to serve you. But that's not a failure of the system, except maybe from your own individual perspective. Believe me, AmEx has done the cost-benefit analysis and they are saving boatloads of money by having those rare well-intentioned hackers listen to some hold music, because it is too expensive to sort you out from the thousands of loonies that got a phishing email. Security breaches are an acknowledged risk and they are already prepared to absorb their effects on multiple levels.

Exactly, it's not a native part of the language, which reinforces my point that the beginner doesn't need to think as much about data structures with PHP. The built-in array() usually can handle the task well enough. They never are left muttering "this would be perfect for a linked hashmap but where is my drat PHP cookbook?"

Perl hashes don't preserve order. PHP's almost always do. i.e., the order you insert keys is the order in which you will receive them back when you iterate over the array. It's similar to a LinkedHashMap in Java.

CS types might recoil at the mixture of behaviors that are baked into PHP's workhorse data structure, but most of them turn out to be quite useful. (And it makes it easier for the beginner programmer to decide what data structure to use: you have keyed data? a list of data? a set of values? doesn't matter, just use an array!)

You're right, both things that the author claimed are lacking are in fact very much available.

PHP >5.3 has lambdas: http://ca3.php.net/manual/en/functions.anonymous.php

PHP >5 can support easy method chaining if you return $this from your method.

Lambdas are not yet common, but method chaining is already easy to find in most well-designed PHP libraries and frameworks.

Are you joking?

1. Define "porn"

2. Get every other TLD operator, including all the international ones, on board with your definition and rules (e.g. are we only banning websites on port 80, or would FTP sites also be verboten? password-protected sites? is classical art exempt?)

3. Enforce the censorship via some kind of magical system that is automated, doesn't trigger false positives, and allows for an appeal process

Yeah, that'll be a snap to put together.

Not a Lakers fan eh? NY's complementary sports colors of choice seem to be orange blue, pretty close to the palette the OP hates (Knicks, Mets).

Handily, the functionality to make them disappear is available in many browser extensions, like Disconnect (http://disconnect.me/).

Well publish it then and post it here! Just change the byline to "I'm glad Arrington resigned..." and all the same arguments follow. A lot of the stories that frontpage on HN seem to be opinionated follow-ups to recent news events.