jim-greer

As far as I can tell that’s dangerous misinformation.

> Not looking good for Waymo...

The trade secret claims are still looking pretty good for Waymo.

This is a great piece.

I'll quibble with this bit though:

> ...toxicity festers in open source because it’s all too common for forks to ground their motivation in emnity towards other projects.

This is wishful thinking, for the most part. Communities don't break off because things are going well. The American Revolution wouldn't have forked if King George had been sympathetic to their needs.

I agree with you on this. We need dense cities that don't depend on cars.

I will say that self-driving cars help a bit in getting people to bike, though. The biggest barrier to biking in San Francisco is people's fear of getting killed by cars (the SF Bike Coalition has done surveys on this). Self-driving cars should pose less of a risk to cyclists - they don't run red lights or speed, etc.

Another potential benefit would be reducing the need for parking. The biggest obstacle to physically separated bike lanes is the space they take up - typically that requires removing parking. If self-driving taxis are super cheap, that should lead to less car ownership, and possibly less demand for parking.

That's all very speculative though.

Why does it matter if games are free software?

I don't see why they should free as in beer - developers need to get paid.

As for being open source, it depends on why you think that’s important. To me, the goals of open source are:

- Make sure that you aren't building your business on top of proprietary software. This isn’t relevant for gamers.

- To increase the productivity of all software developers. This is achieved by open source engines.

The author might as well say that we shouldn't use any proprietary platforms (like, say, Hacker News).

The variance is manageable if you play enough hands. This is one reason why a lot of pros prefer to play online - by playing many tables at once, you get more hands in and can better overcome the variance.

As for tournaments, the variance is even greater, since it is closer to all or nothing. To mitigate this, pros "buy a piece" of each other. Or swap equity. If either wins they pay the other a percentage. If you do this with enough other pros, you even out your swings...

If each player follows your strategy, 40-60% of hands are won by nobody.

Playing 10% of your hands is very tight if you're up against other good players. At a loose table it might be very profitable though, especially if the other players aren't paying attention to how tight you are, and therefore don't give you enough credit for having a strong hand when you do play. That kind of table is pretty common at low limits.

There's so much variance in the game that it would be hard to know how good the AI really is. If they're doing 120K hands heads-up, they'd need to play far more in a full table. Getting that many pros to play that many hands would be difficult.

And what's wrong with heads-up, anyway? It's not as popular as multiway, but it's a fascinating game. In a full table game, you usually only end up playing 20-25% of your hands. Heads up you play 90%+. You end up in leveling wars with your opponent more often, too ("he knows that I know that he knows I usually wouldn't play a premium pair this way").

You don't? UPS can't stop its drivers from making mistakes.

Uber can absolutely fix known issues in its vehicles.

If you have more control, you have more liability.

Edit: Uber probably has product liability. Which is very different from liability for an employee's actions.

I'm not advocating a new law, and neither is the article. I just want Uber to take these cars off the road until they've fixed known safety issues.

The advantage of merging first is that you'd only side-swipe a cyclist.

What's the downside?

Having dedicated turn lanes isn't realistic in San Francisco. Most streets are too narrow.

I disagree, and I think a jury would as well.

Drivers have personal liability. Self-driving cars have corporate liability. I'd expect a big judgment if someone is killed because of a known issue.

It's interesting to think about what the limits of an AI that doesn't have a full human experience are. I think you're probably right that machine vision will be competitive with human vision. It's already much better in specialized areas.

General purpose machine translation is harder, for instance. Brute force algorithms have gotten decent, but aren't in the same ballpark as humans (though professional translation services now often work by correcting a machine translation). However, MT systems trained on a specific domain do much better (medical or legal docs, etc).

What would be the hardest task for machines that's trivial for humans? Maybe deciding if a joke is funny or not?

> "It’s gone too far,” says one venture capitalist...

This investor is probably making more than the vast majority of the people building technology. It's not clear to me why society benefits from that.

High salaries encourage young people to enter the field. That's a good thing.

High housing costs are another matter...

There are some other things you can't do from the browser in addition to sockets. Full screen, camera, and microphone. But most games don't use that stuff.

That's true. Would be nice if Adobe at least threw some resources at it though.

It's a huge undertaking. There are just a ton of library calls to support. Here's the list of AS3.0 classes: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionsc...

And a whole lot of games are still in AS2 - game developers never really embraced AS3.

It really isn't going to happen, I'm afraid.

EDIT - Maybe it's possible to compile the C++ sources for the Flash Player to WebAssembly? Then you wouldn't have to re-implement the libraries.

I don't know the state of these compilers, but there was a Mozilla post about it a while back: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/12/compiling-to-webassembly-i....

Adobe hasn't open sourced the Flash Player, so it would have to be them.

I really wish Adobe would write a Flash runtime in WebAssembly. There are tens of thousands of great Flash games that are unplayable in modern browsers... Sure, you could rewrite them in js, but no one is going to.

It is rumored not to work well at Valve either. Once you get past Dunbar's number, subgroups form. It's better to make them explicit. Otherwise you tend to get cliques, which are probably worse than hierarchy:

http://www.wired.com/2013/07/wireduk-valve-jeri-ellsworth/

Actually that was the original goal of Google Video, which never got much traction and was discontinued eventually.

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

Can you recommend courses/books/etc that take that approach?

Depending on the business needs, returning outliers can be useful even if there are a bunch of false positives.

I'm not a machine learning guy, but when I was at Kongregate, we had a problem with credit card fraud on our virtual goods platform. It wasn't serious fraudsters, just dipshit teens with their parent's credit card.

I had labeled data: historical transactions, with chargebacks, which I fed into Weka. I included all kinds of stuff we knew about the user. A simple rule-based classifier could pick out risky transactions, with a lot of false positives.

I made a simple tool for our customer service team to review these risky transactions. They would decide whether to warn the user, temporarily block them from buying or temp ban them, or permanently ban them.

This worked pretty well for us. The risk factors were new players, players spending quickly, and users who were dicks - as measured by how often others had muted them in chat, how often they swore in chat, etc.

As an aside, saying "fuck" or "shit" in chat wasn't very predictive of fraud - often those terms aren't signs of an abusive user, since they might just be saying "fuck, I suck at this game". What was predictive was users who said "Gay", "Penis", or "Rape". People who use those terms on a game platform are largely dickheads. So the score for abusiveness became known as the "Gay, Penis, Rape Score" or "GPR" for short.

Games simulate the world, more or less. The world has mutable state.

I imagine if you find a good bug and aren't on their list, you could bring in someone who is to help out...

Are others getting a lot of recommendations for old movies? I have to be in just the right mood for a movie from the 1950s or earlier...

Unfortunately for Unity, they don't make any more money on a hit game than on a big-budget failure. All that matters is how many seat licenses they sell. Selling developer tools is not a great business.

I'm not sure that's what he's saying: "the sample used herein is a large and random subset of the to-be-completed data set". I read that as meaning database is to-be-completed, and he's sampling from that.

This analysis is based on crowd-sourced data on shootings. I'm not saying that makes it invalid, but I'd need to know more about the dataset before trusting the results. It seems hard to have it be complete. The official FBI data has the same problem. We need to require local departments to report all shootings in a standardized way.

Edit: the author acknowledges the incompleteness of the data in the conclusions section. Oddly, he doesn't think that's likely to affect the mean "since the sample used herein is a large and random subset of the to-be-completed data set". That doesn't really make sense to me. How would random sampling of incomplete data improve the results?

http://regressing.deadspin.com/deadspin-police-shooting-data...

They do feed on flying fish, among others. Here's a good clip from the newest BBC nature documentary on it:

https://youtu.be/szuchBiLrEM

Internationally you get $0.20/min calls and unlimited 2G data. I'm getting a consistent 0.07 Mbps in Buenos Aires the last few days!