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To those who view this story as political (such as HN moderators), think about it. Press freedom is a much more fundamental issue than political affiliation.

Much of the discussion that has been suppressed by mods on HN has had to with the knee-jerk characterization of stories like this as political. It will be interesting to see whether this story survives on the home page or whether the thought suppression regime (mods and their cronies) is able to suppress it.

Press freedom is, in a sense, in opposition to authoritarianism. HN mods have shown a strong pro-authoritarian sentiment, so I would not be surprised to see this story (and even this comment) come under attack.

Warning: Up-voting this comment will put you on the radar of the moderators.

It's not surprising that home prices have gone through the roof, since many government policies are intended to keep home prices rising.

Someone could say that about an opponent's chess strategy only to be beaten.

Considering that we have known about Stuxnet for nearly a decade, why are we still using OS technology that makes such changes/intrusions/phoning-home so easy to conceal?

Also, what does "flaky" mean? Maybe Steve was willing to reorganize his priorities rapidly enough that some found it flaky or mercurial, but in hindsight it worked.

Ahh. Well, if you consider price a function of supply and demand, then complaining about a price is likely actually a complaint about supply or about demand.

If I say "Wow, the price of a Tesla Model S is too high", I am implicitly saying either "I wish demand for the Model S suddenly fell, leading to a large price drop on existing units" or "I wish a lot more Model S sedans magically got manufactured so that the profit margin available to Tesla on the units sold would be reduced to the point where I could afford one".

Both of those sentiments are fairly silly wishthink. Similarly, so is the sentiment that "Regulators should pass a law requiring all new Model S vehicles to be sold for $20K".

I could define myself as being a victim of the over priced Model S, or I could define myself as being the victim of insufficient wages to afford one at the actual retail price.

I'm not sure why in the case of housing it seems logical to blame the price of the housing instead of blaming the wages that make some standard of living difficult to afford.

For some people, even "affordable" things like community college or McDonalds food is expensive and out of reach. So why not focus on how McDonalds is not "affordable".

One reason why McDonalds is affordable to many is because of the existence of other competitors. My comment above meant to point out that there are many, many ways in which the regulatory landscape limits the number of competitors each landlord faces, driving up prices.

Those points are true of SF rent control, however rent control has the side-effect of leading to people being able to afford a bigger place than they would otherwise afford, which in turn reduces the number of people who can afford to live in the same number of units. Why bother taking on a roommate if your rent controlled price makes the unit affordable? So now that would-be room mate has to find somewhere else to live.

Exactly. Some such policies/laws may be "worth it" because they have other socially desirable outcomes that we rank more highly than affordable housing.

What's odd when seeing my comment get down-voted to oblivion is that I am not making a value judgment about the laws/policies, simply mentioning that many of the ones listed have unintended consequences when it comes to housing affordability.

As usual, downvotes are used instead of a counter-argument because whoever does it lacks the sophistication required to offer one :)

It's frankly pretty silly when people complain about prices (housing prices, prescription drug prices, gas prices, etc.)

The issue with housing prices is that there are a lot of government policies that have the (intentional or unintentional) effect of increasing housing prices. Some of them are as follows:

- Making mortgage interest tax deductible

- Special tax treatment for the sale of a primary residence

- Laws limiting how many people can cohabitate in one building, or similar laws that enforce this more softly through limits on street parking.

- Rent control laws which suppress the price of rental units, limiting the incentive for landlords to build new units.

- Laws that limit the construction (or add extra costs/requirements) to projects that would add more residential units.

- The utter failure of highway infrastructure during rush hour, which adds hours of commute time for short distance travel, drastically increasing the price of residences that do not require a highway commute.

- The failure of municipalities to provide adequate and affordable parking and public transit, adding inconvenience to many neighborhoods which drives up prices in others.

- The failure of law enforcement to create a safe environment in many neighborhoods that offer more affordable housing, leading to increased crime and under-investment in improving and expanding areas that would otherwise be highly desirable for residences.

- Laws that create building code requirements that are not based on sound engineering or safety principles but which create lucrative contracts for certain professions in the building trade... These increase the cost of new construction and make many retrofitting/repurposing projects impossible.

There are many, many more.

When we think about what actually matters when it comes to institutions (public or private) one very important thing is trust.

The NSA has eroded much of the trust it once had. This reduces its effectiveness as an organization and puts all Americans and American companies at increased risk.

Those who committed the crimes revealed by Snowden should be brought to justice, the program dismantled, the hardware auctioned off, and the money returned to taxpayers.

One does not have to be a privacy zealot or an anarchist to believe that the NSA should act within the law.

This is very cool. I have been thinking a lot about ideas in this space for a few years.

> What in the world makes you think that you would be aware of any success whatsoever of intelligence gathering in the Middle East? What makes you think that the situation couldn't have gotten much worse that it did?

To the extent that the expanded sigint is used for actual defense, it's trivial to expect more data to have helped (at least marginally) with the national defense aims of the agency. This is not controversial and somewhat trivial to point out.

The issue is that the NSA's behavior violated the 4th amendment rights of millions of people. You suggest that the ends justify the means. I respect that opinion and may even agree with it, but that doesn't matter.

What matters is that the law was broken in the creation of the domestic surveillance program and nobody is currently serving time in prison for breaking it.

The bill of rights exists because of very hard earned lessons about the appropriate relationship between the people and the government. We let a handful of officials ignore the 4th amendment and steal billions of dollars in taxpayer dollars to build the infrastructure to do so.

This is not just a major violation of rights but a major financial crime. The program should be cancelled, the officials responsible jailed, and the equipment auctioned off so that the proceeds can be returned to taxpayers.

Many of our rights as citizens give criminals and innocent people various protections against law enforcement. This is not a design flaw.

I think the bottom line is that the American people do not really mind the NSA doing this. I suspect this is because most people do not realize just how powerful and privacy-invading metadata surveillance is, or how the dataset does not need to be added to indefinitely to have tremendous value to law enforcement (for appropriate and inappropriate uses) once it exists at sufficient scale.

Since primes are themselves a deep structure of the integers it would not seem possible for a neural network to offer any advantage. The concept of prime "finding" being searching the larger space of positive integers for primes is misleading. Primes are themselves the factors of larger, non-prime numbers.

In chess, the search space is a tree of moves, and the algorithm eliminates some subtrees as being irrelevant to playing the sorts of strategies that beat humans in conventional time-bound contests upon which other algorithms have been trained.

But with primes, the next largest prime is another atom that has the requisite structural property of not being the product of any smaller primes. If there were any other informational aspect to what makes a number prime, then it would be derivable from the definition of primality.

So could a time crystal be viewed as a source for time information in a system?

Why does anyone use 7-Zip? Does it have any advantages over the more widely used alternatives (tarball and zip)?

Indeed. I’ll be moving my coins out ASAP now.

Just curious if that is from a residential internet connection.

I suggest three interesting exercises:

- design a QA process for a software product. How important is "blame" vs team learning? What are the tradeoffs of a blame-oriented approach vs a systems oriented approach?

- build something using AWS or App Engine infrastructure that makes you have to work around the various constraints imposed by the system designers. Consider how to make a system reliable when building it using "unreliable" services.

- consider a Marxist interpretation of the US legal system. I'd argue that it constitutes a reasonable systems oriented critique, and makes it clear how (at least for me) pre-existing biases made it at first seem absurd. I suggest this mainly to highlight how biases can impact systems thinking. The QA process example is also deeply emotionally charged for many engineers but should not be.

Craigslist personals offered us a very clear view of the utter failure of authorities to combat sex trafficking.

> Yep that exposure control / sensor quality of the dash cam in the video was rubbish.

Is that the same cam used by the AI to detect obstacles?

I would expect a safe self driving car to include IR cameras that can be more cautious about moving warm blooded creatures.

Surely some more detailed telemetry data would reveal whether the main issue is with the sensors or with the algorithm.

While that (excellent) episode is perhaps a bit hyperbolic, why would a business not want to use any segmentation techniques at its disposal. Marketers call this attracting "qualified" customers, and it's why fine dining restaurants do not also offer fast food burgers via an attached drive-through, and why a five star hotel does not convert unbooked rooms into hostels.

It's a dark pattern nudge, not a hard rule.

This sounds horrible, but the "Real Name" movement for online services (such as Facebook) is an equally insidious American version. When a "real name" service becomes a financial services company, we have a merging of social metadata and a conventional credit score.

It does not start out as a dystopian vision. Why should Facebook charge advertisers money to show ads to people with a 400 credit score? The yield of many ads is improved when you have hard demographic and behavioral data as an additional filter.

What's the difference between an Uber Pool rider getting a ride with other similarly-rated riders? Why should I with a near 5 star rating have to risk sitting in a pool with someone who has a 3.2 star rating? I certainly don't want to.

- Any of the Sinatra-derived frameworks (flask, express, etc. Language isn't a major factor as the API is small).

- Neo4j graph db instead of a relational db. Simple crud stuff is easy, and you can encode most business logic (if there is a need for anything beyond basic crud) as simple graph operations, avoiding the need for a bunch of other boilerplate that is found in frameworks that leverage ORMs.

Is anyone aware of a GAN example using propel or deeplearn.js ?

Why is Google investing in its own?

What is the hardest thing to accomplish with something like a TPU? Is it the IP or the fabrication?

How does the TPU design offer improved performance? By leveraging IP or fabrication improvements?

If political discussions that evoke partisan loyalties end up being classified as “flame wars” due to the definition in the article, then if those involved in the so-called flame wars are censured (throttled etc) then effectively the topic has been discouraged simply because the votes averaged lower than the number of comments. Over time users learn to ignore such topics.

The big goof up is in the idea that all discussions with widespread disagreement are harmful. It’s an absurd view of manners akin to saying that discussion about the ethics of slavery is simply rude to participate in regardless of one’s views and regardless of whether any of the comments are actually rude or disrespectful (or are even, themselves, partisan. The votes may be where partisanship gets introduced).

Slavery is a bad example because it seems morally obvious and thus the enlightened side seems obvious. But many issues today lack moral clarity which is why intelligent discussion of them is deeply important.

Politics can be messy but in many ways political topics represent the conflict between values as some values gain or lose prominence.

> politics short circuits people's brains.

I think this is a very cynical view. To some extent the demagogues and "ruling class" among us try to oversimplify things and create emotionally potent talking points.

But ultimately as citizens we must figure out reality for ourselves without the emotionally potent, over-simplified explanations offered by partisans.

We must be patient that some of us may not have realized (yet) how to think in a rational way about politics, not just abandon it completely.