bdrool

As others have pointed out, the short timeline is mainly due to Hotz himself and his plan for putting the product on the market so quickly.

> He's currently throwing a temper tantrum on Twitter

He said the NHTSA made "no attempt at a dialog". What does he call that letter? Ridiculous.

Another one, where they tried to scam a tax professional:

https://youtu.be/poFAzDCGLrI?t=36s

> That's part of a chapter of the book called Minimizing Control Structures.

Since the book is creative commons and freely available, I decided to download the book and have a look. Figure 8.1, the "automatic teller" example is just downright hilarious. The author presents the code and throws a challenge at the reader: "Easy to read? Tell me under what condition the user’s card gets eaten." Here's the code:

  IF card is valid DO
    IF card owner is valid DO
      IF request withdrawal DO
        IF authorization code is valid DO
          query for amount
          IF request <= current balance DO
            IF withdrawal <= available cash DO
              vend currency
              debit account
            ELSE
              message
              terminate session
          ELSE
            message
            terminate session
        ELSE
          message
          terminate session
      ELSE
        IF authorization code is valid DO
          query for amount
          accept envelope through hatch
          credit account
        ELSE
          message
          terminate session
    ELSE
      eat card
  ELSE
    message
  END

(hopefully no transcription errors from copying out of the PDF…)

Yes, it's easy. It gets eaten if the owner is not valid. Took one glance.

The thing that makes me laugh is that the example is contrived. This is the sort of thing code editors solve. Even though I could quickly glance at it and decipher the conditionals by eye, if I were working with this I'd still throw it into an editor that shows me code scope. That makes it trivial and removes any chance of error. This is a problem that has been solved.

I'm sure I will get a lot of responses saying I've missed the point, and yes I'm aware that I've dodged it, but the author acts like the problem of navigating nested conditionals is somehow impossible, which I think is ridiculous. Not only do lots people do it every day, not only are there tools that help us do so, but there's pretty much no way to exist in this world without depending on software that is written this way (ever looked at the source for GCC, to pick one example?) Not saying it's right, but it's clearly not a deadly problem.

Amazon is inching more and more towards a giant fraud operation every day. I'm glad this is getting more attention, however I fear it will continue unabated until someone is seriously injured or killed due to a dangerous knockoff causing a fire or other life-threatening hazard.

It's also rather unbelievable to me that big companies like Apple haven't come down on them like a ton of bricks for such large-scale facilitation of trademark violation. It's good that they are finally going after one of the individual vendors, but that's whack-a-mole at the end of the day. How big does the problem have to get before there is pushback against Amazon itself?

The very first thing I ever heard about Burning Man was how it wasn't cool any more. This was in the 1990s.

I've come to believe that the real purpose of Burning Man is to have these kinds of meta-discussions. The actual gathering in the desert is nothing but a side effect.

Free internet, or just free Facebook (plus a few token sites to look like they're trying)?

Seriously, is there anyone left who isn't fully aware this is just a ploy to create more lock-in and entrenchment, disguised as charity?

I doubt most who say this sort of thing mean it literally (although no doubt some naive sorts do, but they usually are self-identifying through the other outrageous things they say, and thus can be ignored). But one counterpoint to keep in mind is that the alternative view is every company is running as efficiently as possible. I doubt anyone really always believes that, either. For example, when a story about Twitter was posted on HN recently, it was widely discussed that they probably don't need anywhere near as many engineers as they actually have, and could perhaps reduce costs to the point where they are at or near profitability just by reducing staff. There might be some truth to that. Point being, it's not that simple, and there are no absolutes.

f.lux was pretty life changing for me when I first tried it, but I'm uncomfortable with the fact that it is free-with-no-ads-yet-closed-source. That's just ... odd. Eventually, I uninstalled it and instead just started going into System Preferences by hand when it gets late in the day and switching color profiles (which is all f.lux seems to do anyway) to something that is based on a lower white point. In my admittedly unscientific testing, it seems to have the same effect as f.lux, which is what I would expect.

I hope Apple releases Night Shift for macOS soon and then I can stop manually switching color profiles around, but for now it's not a big deal.

Soon it will be revealed that North Korea had actually saved up a bunch of zero days and just pwned the machines of millions of curious people around the world who loaded up these sites when they hit the news yesterday.

They should have called it "Cruise Control Plus™" or something similar. Regardless of the usual arguments about how accurate the name is according to the avionics definition of the term, "autopilot" is misleading in the context of the consumer car market. Tesla should not have named it that.

People who actually understand information theory know why that argument is facile.

Oh awesome, I can't wait to buy a knock off truck from "Ford-Motors" that has a handful of fake 5-star reviews and doesn't meet safety standards. Thanks, Amazon!

(See here for explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939829)

I am unable to read articles about fMRI results without thinking of this:

http://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

> [W]hile electron positions are unpredictable, molecular reactions, the sort that happen in the human brain are pretty predictable. Basically, my response to this is "That would be relevant if we had black holes or large hadron colliders in our heads, but we don't, so...".

What about those quantum effects that have recently been shown to potentially be part of brain activity:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140116085105.h...

> Men haven't had that liberation; a large part of society still believes in specific roles and responsibilities for men that coupled females are (at their option) exempted from.

It's probably going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. As it stands right now, women have nearly all the power in heterosexual relationships, so they are able to see to it that progress is made in removing their own shackles while keeping them firmly in place on men. This is not some evil conspiracy, it's just a natural consequence of self-interest combined with a power imbalance. (Incidentally, one of the other rigid expectations of society is that this power imbalance is never discussed out in the open, so I fully expect a harsh negative reaction to this comment.)

The only things which could change this situation are technological emergences which directly impact the power dynamic: realistic sex robots, artificial wombs, AI strong enough to put everyone permanently out of work, etc. Some of these might balance things out to a more equal level, while some of them might tip the scales wildly in one direction or another. It remains to be seen how things will play out as technology advances, but it is doubtful that things will stay as they are now over the long term, even if they do in the near / foreseeable term.

I'm wondering how many ports they are going to remove. Fingers crossed they will keep plain HDMI and not make us go back to Thunderbolt / MiniDisplayPort.

(Oh, and it'd be nice if they did something about the potential for Thunderbolt viruses...)

> Non-programmers make this mistake all the time: thinking that the syntax is the hard part of programming.

Programmers make it all the time too, or at least something very similar. See all those people who are on the endless quest for the "perfect" language, which usually means one which allows for writing the shortest code, sometimes at a very high cognitive cost for very little payoff. No, I really don't want to do a massive amount of mental backflips just to save a few characters, thanks.

I knew that would be response, but a tiny handful of token free sites don't help. It's either the internet or it isn't. And guess what: it's not.

It's impossible to overstate just how bad it would be to allow Facebook to define what is and isn't "the internet" for billions of people. I'm continuously stunned that anyone would defend their efforts in this area.

> I'm curious what others think about the vision for a more-connected world.

I don't know about anyone else, but giving people Facebook-only service and calling it pretending that's the same as full internet access is not my idea of "more connected". Free or not, that's an insane level of lock-in.

There's also this crudely drawn but shockingly engrossing series:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHKuF51aPFaq-2UvU-HkS...

As well as all the follow-ups and side stories by the same person (check their channel for the rest).

Yes, I realize that. I was not saying this is the exact same thing that is being discussed in the article.

However, it is similar in that Amazon should be exercising more control over their inventory and logistics, not to mention the case I am talking about is arguably much more egregious and much more within Amazon's control to fix. I think that makes it highly relevant as a comment to this story.

Amazon is complete crap these days.

It's becoming more and more difficult to figure out who you are buying from, and as a result there are outright scams sitting on Amazon's store at this moment that they continue to do nothing about:

https://www.amazon.ca/ORIGINAL-MACBOOK-Magsafe-ADAPTER-CHARG...

See that? That's the infamous "dangerous" counterfeit Apple Macbook charger that made the rounds[1][2] a while back. Notice how it says "by Apple-Computers"? This is a scam. It's not by Apple. It's a dangerous fire-hazard knockoff. Yet it's tagged in a way that will no doubt mislead people into thinking it's safe and "official". People were pointing this out months ago[3], yet it's still there on Amazon's store, no doubt along with countless other dangerous misleadingly-branded ripoffs.

This is fraud, pure and simple. And Amazon continues to profit from it, right out in the open. It's disgusting.

  [1] http://www.righto.com/2016/03/counterfeit-macbook-charger-teardown.html
  [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11325150
  [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11325464

If the intended insinuation of this essay is that somehow there aren't a bunch of seriously over-valued companies out there, or that there isn't a long-overdue downturn on the way, then I'm afraid I can't bring myself to agree.

People young enough to have never been through a downturn in their professional career are usually in denial right up until the moment it happens. And the people who try to call the bubble early, as funny as it may be to make fun of them as is being done here, are usually the ones who have been through it before, see it coming early, and try to warn everyone, even though no one ever listens (too busy enjoying the party!)

> Driving in India is only insane to westerners.

According to Wikipedia[1], there are 56% more traffic fatalities annually than in the US. Compared to the UK, it's 472% more. I don't think it's merely a matter of perspective. The data indicates it's much more dangerous in absolute terms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

> a Objective-C to C converter (if there isn't one already)

Incidentally, that's pretty much how the language got started -- as a pre-processor add-on for plain C:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C#History

This is what Objective-C looks like if you "unroll" it to plain C. Not too surprisingly, it's very verbose. Other than as an exercise, there's no reason to do this, particularly given that Objective-C is a strict superset of C.[1]

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19366134/what-does-object...

Driverless cars will happen at the same time for everyone. Uber's competitors will get them at the same time they do. It will not amount to a long-term or even short-term advantage.

> Cornell professors Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn found that women were paid 79 cents for each dollar a man was paid. Even after adjusting for type of job, industry, experience, location and education, the gap remained 92 cents for each dollar.

What do they mean "even" after controlling for those factors? Why wouldn't you control for those factors -- the comparison is meaningless otherwise.

The article mentions the iPhone SE and how its expected sales are not expected to offset the slowdown of the iPhone 6s and 6s+ sales. I realized I had forgotten the SE even existed (even though it was just been announced a few weeks ago) until this article reminded me of it.

To me, this is just further confirmation that Apple's product line is a complete mess. Just go to (apple.com/iphone/compare) or (apple.com/ipad/compare) and look at how ridiculous it is. Can anyone really tell me which one of those models is "best"? There is no clear winner -- the ones with the bigger screen sizes and storage capacity don't have the latest CPUs or other features. Anyone remember the simple "Good, Better, Best" models of Powerbooks?

It is starting to feel like Apple is overdue for a product line simplification, like when the four quadrant product grid was first introduced:

https://youtu.be/VkVs4ZqWgN8