Hacker News Reader

helllllllloooon The Mueller Report [pdf]

Can anyone explain the criteria for redaction and who gets to decide in this case? The DoJ? A brief skim through shows whole pages redacted.

helllllllloooon Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote film finally hits the big screen after 25 years

It's great. It's semi-adaptation of 1984 without directly taking the story it feels very similar in spirit. The soul crushing effects of malicious beurcracy, someone seeing past the facade and going though a lot of pain while trying to escape it. The movie equivalent of calling to cancel Comcast, where the feeling of knowing the experience is going to be so bad it puts you off doing it.

helllllllloooon AI Podcast: Elon Musk on Tesla Autopilot [video]

Exactly. He's a car salesman. I work in CV and automotive and the stuff he's saying will be around the corner isn't solved in research with a $100k set of sensors and progress has plateaued. These are "two ton death machines", a direct quote for Elon in the interview, and overstating what these systems can do to customers who don't understand the state of computer vision is morally bankrupt.

helllllllloooon AI Podcast: Elon Musk on Tesla Autopilot [video]

"The rate of improvement is exponential" - Elon Musk on the state of improvement in self driving during this conversation.

This is literally the opposite of what is true.

The rate of improvement has slowed down as the low hanging problems have been addressed. Everyone has pushed their timelines out.

It's pretty bad that a research scientist at MIT didn't call him out on this. What's the point in someone who works in the field conducting interviews if he doesn't question the interviewee.

helllllllloooon Berkeley Blue – Accelerating robotics through low-cost hardware

Define low-cost? What sensors are being used in the video?

helllllllloooon AI Podcast: Elon Musk on Tesla Autopilot [video]

Until the onus is on Tesla to prove their claims, rather than cherry picking statistics for marketing, it's better to be sceptical of what they say about safety of an unproven emerging technology that they are emphasizing to sell more cars. Basically, Tesla needs to prove that this reasonable analysis is wrong because they are the people making the claims about safety.

They really shouldn't get the benefit of the doubt. The burden of proof is on the company selling a system to control a two ton vehicle travelling over 70mph.

helllllllloooon AI Podcast: Elon Musk on Tesla Autopilot [video]

This is not an apples to apples comparison. Tesla autopilot only drives the easiest subset of what a human driver can do and has a human supervising it while it does it to catch mistakes. This paints a picture that is disingenuous.

It's like having a doctor that only accepts completely healthy 20 year old patients quoting their stats compared to the general population.

These cars are no where near being fully autonomous and the story that Elon is paining about this happening in a few years with the sensors in a Tesla and the current state of research is a fantasy. End of the day he's a car salesman so take it with a pinch of salt.

helllllllloooon Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI

https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/04/07/how-amazon-costco-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-cloud-on...

AWS makes all the money, everything else is marginal.

> Amazon Web Services, which accounted for about 89% of Amazon's $1 billion total operating profit this past quarter. That's despite AWS accounting for just 10% of the company's overall revenue during the same time frame.

> But despite all of this, Amazon generates just a fraction of its net earnings from e-commerce. Instead, Amazon's bread and butter is its cloud computing segment, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

helllllllloooon Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI

https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/04/07/how-amazon-costco-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-cloud-on...

AWS makes all the money, everything else is marginal.

> But despite all of this, Amazon generates just a fraction of its net earnings from e-commerce. Instead, Amazon's bread and butter is its cloud computing segment, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

helllllllloooon Amazon's empire rests on its low-key approach to AI

I thought Amazon's empire rests on AWS which actually funds the company allowing them to make a sustained loss on their retail business despite attempts to automate with robotics and ML.

helllllllloooon Removing Array Duplicates

That's not really a fuller explaination.

helllllllloooon Coinbase Debit Card

Bitcoin at this point is purely speculative and this is almost like hooking up a debit card to my Robinhood account and selling stock to pay for it every time I buy something.

Seems to completely work around the reasons why Bitcoin etc. were interesting in the first place as a technology.

helllllllloooon Removing Array Duplicates

My first thought was using a map to store what's been seen and run through the list keeping copying the values that haven't been seen to a new list in order or just marking them as dupes in place with the empty string.

This seems to be the "alt" case and is dismissed by the author but would like to hear a fuller explaination of why this is a problem?

helllllllloooon Show HN: Tree of Reddit Sex Life

In chrome Android click the checkbox under the 3 dots menu labeled "Desktop site". Pinch to zoom works then.

helllllllloooon Uber S-1

That's a long way away. The self driving technology has plateaued after the initial controlled tech demos and isn't looking likely to be useful in the general way that Uber needs any time soon. Maybe they can get it working in some very favourable routes but not enough to balance the books. Some really hard problems still exist with algos and sensors and the costs will be high for a long time. If the bet is on autonomous vehicles it's a very long bet.

helllllllloooon Uber S-1

True AV are not possible right now nor for the foreseeable future. The technology has plateaued progress has slowed after the first rounds of demo technology showcases by all the big players. New research breakthroughs are needed and more robust and cheaper sensors. Throwing more money/people at the problem doesn't solve this and betting on AVs to make Uber profitable is a very long bet.

helllllllloooon Congress Is About to Ban the US Government from Offering Free Online Tax Filing

This is pointless obstruction and ironically a waste of my tax money. You could easily have the government automatically complete your taxes for the simple cases and have software like TurboTax for the difficult ones.

To the people complaining about the possibility of a government run site being poor have you used TurboTax? I've used it twice now and will never use it again. The dark patterns, upselling and fake loading screens really obscured how simple my taxes actually were to do.

helllllllloooon The Scots mayor in north Germany being pushed out due to Brexit

Scots law still seems plural to me i.e. The law of the Scots. Neither example you gave refers to an individual law or pine.

"Scots mayor" in this cases refers to an individual and just seems a little off. Happy to be corrected :) also not a big deal either way as the writer is German.

helllllllloooon The Scots mayor in north Germany being pushed out due to Brexit

I believe it is still a plural use of Scots i.e. The law of the Scots. "Scots mayor" is in this case is not referring a mayor of Scotland but an individual who is Scottish and happens to be a major. Just seems off. But the writer is German so no worries.

helllllllloooon The Scots mayor in north Germany being pushed out due to Brexit

I'm from the UK. Scots as plural is normal. This seems to be singular i.e. The Scottish mayor -> The Scots mayor.

helllllllloooon The Scots mayor in north Germany being pushed out due to Brexit

Yeah, that's plural.

helllllllloooon The Scots mayor in north Germany being pushed out due to Brexit

> The Scots mayor in north Germany being pushed out due to Brexit

Never heard "Scots" used as an acceptable, non-plural, abreviation of Scottish.

helllllllloooon Nuclear power is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions, decarbonize

Exactly, people can't agree on basic stuff that will help people at a small scale. This is beyond a technical problem but more a problem with a disfunctional processes. We could solve lots of current problems if there was the collective will to.

helllllllloooon Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

Exactly. People on here treat companies with nuance and analyze their pros and cons but often with unions they get lumped into the all unions are bad bucket without considering what aspects of unionizing are good and bad with any real depth.

I could compare all companies to the worst examples too (e.g. all startups are Theranos) but that would never be taken seriously nor would it be fair yet somehow with unions that level of analysis is taken seriously.

helllllllloooon Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

This. It's coming for the rest of the industry. Amazon and Google aren't encouraging young people to code for the good of the world. It's so the can hire people for less money once the pool is larger. The intent is to drive down the cost so that devs will do the exact same work and the company will take a larger cut of the profit. Once this gets to a point of exploitation like in the games industry a union is necessary unless you are lucky enough to choose the right speciality but this is a gamble.

helllllllloooon Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

I'd love to understand how many people who frequent hacker news have actual experience with a union directly beyond what the have read? The anti union rethoric is strong in the US and it seems like a lot of comments start with the position that unions are bad and go from there without really understanding what they do or thinking through what things good unions can do well.

Companies have spent a lot of time and money spreading this message so it's not suprising but it seems like a default position of many tech workers I've met in the Bay Area while they also grumble about many aspects of their job.

helllllllloooon Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

You don't seem to understand what a union is. It's a group of people getting together to "say no to ridiculous work conditions". A union is literally how you join together to say no when you don't have individual power. The level of straight up anti-union rethoric on here without really understanding what a good union does is revealing.

helllllllloooon Lidar mapping techniques using multiple sensors

It's using ICP to register sucessive lidar scans. All three lidars are calibrated so the relative positions are known and the data from all three can be combined.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_closest_point

This alone isn't SLAM but can be used for odometry as part of a SLAM system.

helllllllloooon Researchers trick Tesla autopilot into driving into opposing traffic

GM super-cruise is the best system out there right now and they are very modest in their claims. All these systems have problems.

Tesla is the one making the big claims and drawing attention to themselves. How many others are claiming full autonomy is just around the corner? They bring the publicly on themselves and can't have it both ways.

https://electrek.co/2019/03/29/tesla-full-self-driving-compu...

helllllllloooon Researchers trick Tesla autopilot into driving into opposing traffic

How you implement these systems matters. GM super-cruise (not to be confused with Cruise automation) uses HD mapping + GNSS + visual queues and could potentially do better due to having priors from the map. Tesla's approach that doesn't utilize a map is likely more susceptible.

https://www.wired.com/story/cadillac-super-cruise-ct6-lidar-...

https://www.cadillac.com/world-of-cadillac/innovation/super-...