javindo

Feels incredibly strange that anyone can publicly view all these office layouts, down to very specific room/corridor/stair layouts, occupancy status, of random private office and university buildings...

The fact it seems to be related to login reminds me of the Tom Scott doomsday fictional lecture which I would link to but you know...

Why is it any more of an issue in software engineering than, say, a singer or actor publicly supporting a cause?

GDS hosts a CF instance called PaaS (Platform as a Service) which hosts web applications on *.cloudapps.digital but the majority of the actual GOV.UK estate is hosted in AWS, as is GOV.UK Verify. I believe GOV.UK Pay might be on PaaS and a lot of internal tooling is.

(Source: have worked at GDS for the past couple of years.)

Under fairly draconian UK law where this is based, probably not: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/contents

Since surprisingly nobody has mentioned it in the comments here yet, we have a similar scheme in place in London, and have done for quite some time. It's only for the most central/congested zone and has had a hugely beneficial impact on congestion.

That being said, it almost never makes sense to drive a car inside central London anyway as the public transport is very reliable and has almost full coverage, and it's dealing with a very different problem in the first place (old horse and cart windy roads adjusting for the modern age).

Not sure if it's the same client, but the Skye for Business client is also just as bad.

I used to work on a virtualised Windows machine (work mandated) and the only usable accessibility option was a high DPI setting. The old Lync client worked perfectly with this, obviously dating back to an age where they cared about accessibility. Skype for business completely ignored system DPI settings, made certain things huge with other things being tiny.

The spacing was the biggest issue - literally 30-40% of my 43" monitor would often be taken up by spacing around icons etc on the app.

It really felt as though they just stopped putting as much effort into UX, accessibility, usability. Lync felt like a professional IM client, Skype for Business felt like a half baked bodge.

Is there a clear definition between airfield and airport? Or rather, is there a distinction between places you can land a plane vs places an individual can buy a ticket to fly with an airline? I imagine this line gets blurred in certain countries more so than others, perhaps that's what the posted dataset is more geared towards?

With the ever increasing price of BTC you could even end up inadvertently making a small profit on the transaction. That being said, with the volatility of it you could also lose all of your money in an instant.

As with any automated transport discussion, there's the question of liability. If a pilot is at fault, there's an obvious liability on them. People have an intrinsic trust of a human pilot to sort out an issue if it arises, versus relying on a computer which is a complete black box to the passengers. If a pilot is at fault, it's a forgivable thing - in the worst cases the families have some closure, some level of "the pilot messed up, such is life". If a machine or system is at fault, who's to blame? The engineer? The programmer? The maintenance worker? The airline for procuring a cheap contract?

I really wish Google AMP didn't overrule the Chrome android "force enable pinch to zoom" from an accessibility standpoint.

> Should a user be able to purposefully block parts of a page?

I have yet to see a compelling/coherent argument for why they shouldn't.

As a partially sighted user myself, I find it infuriating when web developers try to override browser behaviour/modifications (e.g. blocking pinch to zoom). If we go down a path where users can't modify pages, we are taking a huge step backwards.

I have a visual impairment and one of the things I love about Chrome on Android is the ability to override sites blocking pinch to zoom (i.e. "force enable pinch to zoom").

AMP, also made by Google, seems to somehow get around this browser setting, making AMP sites unreadable and therefore completely useless to me.

Why does Google have these obvious discrepancies between their own products?

Does anyone else get the impression that this might have just been an intern project* or similar?

Seems very odd for a seemingly minor iterative update to pop up out of nowhere after such a long time otherwise.

* The update, not Google Glass itself

I had a very similar experience - I'm also quite fair due to Albinism which I think raised far more attention than the average white person over there! I had many people wanting to take their photograph with me, constant staring and quite a few girls approaching me on the street/subways/shops.

One of the most endearing things was when somebody would try to test out their very limited knowledge of English on me at random, they'd often seem quite proud of themselves and I was always happy to oblige.

(Incidentally my girlfriends home province is also Xinjiang!)

The recent press about this is incredulous. Research and development aren't free. It costs $0 to acquire a software executable - so it should be free by this logic!

Always looking for a tool to do this, your solution looks really elegant and handy - love the report page.

What do you plan to do with the "recommendations" feature?

Whilst I am a huge advocate of advancing research in AI, I think we are a very long way off it being safely feasible in flight. Flight is a process so insanely complex and susceptible to random change and failure that we simply don't have the requisite provable AI in place yet to support it.

A good example of where, even the highest level of automation in an aircraft, failed to assist in an emergency was Qantas Flight 32 [1]. A physical failure on the plane caused sensor and control failures, something rendering AI almost completely useless. Admittedly, humans can also have failures and this has lead to many crashes before, however humans have also used exemplary skill, experience, and abstract problem solving to correct mechanical failures in aeroplanes countless other times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_32

This raises an interesting question - did Google intend to trick not only consumers, but also shareholders? As the article indicates, announcing a product triggers a kneejerk reaction in the market, which might be something Google would want to avoid on such a risky project.

Somewhat off-topic anecdote on this: my father in law designed a very rough draft of "blueprints" for his parents new house in rural China (Xinjiang) using MS Paint, local labourers built it in a few months and it's still standing 10 years later!

Whilst this is a great idea which I look forward to watching progress, Sirius doesn't seem like the best name for this. It's very close to an existing industry product in the same category and Apple certainly don't hold back in trademark litigation.

This is a tremendously reassuring article for someone still in University wanting to build a company. There's always the question in the back of my mind "should I start now or get a few years experience?" and articles like this reassure that it's not too late if you need a couple of years to build skills.

Do you ever get airlock issues where the glass slides around too much? Have been considering a glass layer on a desk project for a while but I'm concerned one wrong move and it could end up on the floor!

This is really good fun except it's incredibly difficult to read the navigation beacon names, even with zoom it is just very pixilated.

There's no honour among thieves.

That's a very interesting hypothesis, but once you step outside into the real world I wouldn't imagine it being too difficult to spot the androids from the mortals!

I don't really want to come across as hostile to the views of such a well respect physicist, but this article represents the view which is often held by those who are very intelligent yet lack the actual study of AI.

Anybody who has actually, or is currently, studying AI will know that there are fundamental differences in programming "AI" and some self aware magic computation which is almost entirely unfathomable. With current knowledge, at least, the only way to have any sort of learning is to design and implement algorithms to do so. There can of course be incredibly abstract knowledge base designs and the computation can assimilate incredibly complex knowledge from those, however it is almost a logical fallacy to suggest that we would ever lose control of something autonomous due to some sort of "rogue agent".

Of course, there are very real risks with something like AI, but it's much less sinister than what the article suggests. For example, faulty code or errors in the knowledge base could lead it to make a bad decision, but humans can also do that.

I don't think we should be dismissing the risks necessarily, but I do believe that it is completely far fetched to say we would be making the worst mistake in history if we are to dismiss a film as science fiction!

This opinion might be unpopular, but I've found over the past decade or so that any reasonably sized tech community seems to have a huge hard-on for Apple. I saw it on Engadget in the early days, reddit as it grew, now HN and so on.

They're a cool company and all but I agree, fortunately things like this have a way of sliding off the HN frontpage fairly quickly.

It's a shame to see such a thing happening to a YC project, but I suppose they're all grown up now and responsible for their own decisions.

This feels like HN satire but someone has actually gone and written the code so it's fairly elaborate...