HN user
One problem with these hypersonic endeavors and DOD development in general is there are too few tests (And done too slowly) to iterate. The developers do not get lots of opportunities to learn from real-data, like at SpaceX. Instead, there are low-single-digit numbers of tests with tons of political attention ready to pounce at the smallest (And most common!) failure.
It's not for "no reason" - Public education's primary purpose in the United States, other than indoctrination, is daycare for the workforce.
So school must start early enough parents can get children to school before heading to their jobs.
Yes, but as he correctly points out, none of those things were done by the local govts.
OpenAI's need for these types of "closed" deals is driven by the fact their technology is fundamentally dependent on data & compute infrastructure that only a few organizations in the world can afford. It doesn't matter how many white papers they publish making AI "open" if it costs $100Ms to train & deploy.
You could do more to make AI "Open" by working on semiconductors to bring design, test, and fab costs down by orders of magnitude or working on modeling which drastically reduces training & data requirements.
"low-income, ethnic minority neighbourhoods have historically been over-policed so the data shows them as crime hotspots, leading to the deployment of more police to those areas."
This is wrong. They've been under-policed. And the unwillingness to not lie about that, let alone understand why that is, is why "predictive policing" is disliked. It's also why the rhetorical trick of "systemic racism" is necessary to elide the fact that racism is rare today and justify why politicians are attacking & dismantling functioning institutions rather than fix the underlying issue.
Does anyone seriously claim that suburbs like Beachwood, OH and Palo Alto, CA and Everett, WA would discover a bunch of undetected rapes, gun violence, robberies, and murders if they were "over-policed" like low-income black neighborhoods? No, they don't. Because that would be too silly of a claim to make directly to anyone who has lived in such a place.
There's a humane chain of logic we must follow here. Do we think slavery, red-lining, drugs & drug-enforcement, and the collapse of rising working class wages have hurt African-American well-being? Yes. Does poverty correlate with crime? Yes. Does poverty correlate with African-American neighborhoods? Yes. Ok, so we can admit that African Americans account for a hugely disproportionate amount of violent crime in the United States without disrespecting how black communities got to this point or worrying that this simple, obvious conclusion is driven by racism.
This is trivially produced from well-done statistical research. If you control for either poverty rates or crime rates, you recover the same rate of police use of lethal force for both whites and blacks.
"Oh, well, the data sets from the past may be biased with racism"
13% of the population accounts for between 40-50% of the homicides, year over year. Alright - How large do you think purely unfounded biases account for that? Half? Even then, you have both 1) A LE agencies either falsifying or mishandling data on a massive scale, a monumental scandal in itself and 2)a population accounting for 2x rather than 3-4x their expected homicide rate. Not a huge improvement. I don't feel like the claims of "warped data" deserve this much respect because the people who make them never give the same thought to the much more obvious conclusion - The data is true, but I do.
ML is disliked here because it doesn't lie. Politicians cannot torture or cajole logistic regression to lie because it doesn't have a career, it doesn't need a promotion, it just graphs the truth. But more than this, they dislike it because it indicts them for not doing more, and more meaningful and honest things, to actually improve the lot of African-Americans in this country. The first step to doing that is being honest.
Ok. Replace the CCP and China in my comment with the other countries you mentioned. You get the exact same mechanism of degradation of your universities, you're just still trying to feel better about it by pointing out that your charity is towards other, poorer, less authoritarian countries than China.
The thing policymakers do not understand about globalism is that it takes advantage of existing institutions, necrotizing them in the process, by infecting them with incentives they were never designed to handle. Where once you had a closed system that was working well, you now have a system exposed to graft, grift, and entropy from agents without accountability for how they take advantage of it. So, these agents can find ways to leverage an institutions' own interests against the interests of the people it was originally designed to serve. Much the same way European imperialists could exploit the internal fissures of colonized peoples. Sand in the gears of a clock.
This is what happened to manufacturing in the United States. Once the American governance class became culturally and financially loyal to Wall Street, there was nothing stopping developing nations & capital from convincing them to move the entire American industrial base abroad in pursuit of higher returns, no matter the irreversible social damage it caused at home.
The Charity Consolation Prize is exactly what those businessmen and policymakers pat themselves on the back with too when they look at the destruction wrought on the American middle class ("Look at home many Indian people we've lifted out of poverty!"). Which would be great! If they were the leaders of India!
So you are right that it's driven by greed now, but it's not just "something that happens." The university system in the U.S. and Australia did not just wake up one day and decide to become addicted to Chinese money. Someone gave them a needle full of the stuff to try. It's an exploit in the system that can be closed. It's a choice.
He thought giving them a fake face would gum up their search quality and ability to resolve him. I'm saying it would basically be a null-photo to Clearview.
Just for the record, the journalist who broke the story on Clearview noted that Clearview AI has specifically demonstrated it isn't fooled by thispersondoesnotexist.com:
https://twitter.com/kashhill/status/1218542846694871040?s=20
You won't be giving them any info on you, but you won't be confounding them either.
These problems are not due to an "administration". The rot of American institutions is deep. The competence and coherence of the entire American civil service and civil life has fallen precipitously in the last 20 years, and, in part because of their irrational fixation on this administration, people still cannot wrap theirs head around the fact that problem is in personnel and structure.
The CDC botched the development & rollout of a pretty simple PCR assay. The CDC happily participated in the 'don't test, don't tell' cover-up of the real # of stateside cases. The CDC and FDA were in territorial pissing matches with one another around test regulation. The FDA has hindered the effective deployment of tests and therapies at every turn. The entire journalistic chattering class was lecturing the American public no more than 2 weeks ago about how over-reacting to the virus or calling it the wrong name was more dangerous than the virus itself. The American economy spent the last 3 decades moving every single manufacturing facility and shred of know-how that could make PPE, ventilators, and pharmaceutical precursors overseas to save a few pennies, and wasn't stopped by the government. And we've now learned Congress was given an accurate assessment of the pandemic threat months ago and chose to... sell their private stocks.
This crisis is not going to result in happy little vision-less "to-do list" for future bureaucrats to improve upon, it is deepening the American people's awareness that the entire bureaucracy & elite class have been shown wanting and must be replaced in their entirety by massive reform of the federal civil service.
More to the point, detecting a stealth aircraft is very different from shooting at a stealth aircraft.
This radar would likely not have the location accuracy of where exactly the B-2 was to accurately engage it with a missile. Your accuracy would be limited by the rate of RF pings the B-2 is putting off, and then the margin-of-error of these RF waves and receiver.
This is one difference between the B-2 and stealth fighters like the F-22 & F-35: The latter are not necessarily designed to be invisible, only impossible to reliably hit. Their shapes and radar-absorbent paint deflect, diffuse, or absorb the high-frequency bands used in the terminal guidance of missiles. So they are hard to target. But they can be picked up at range by long-distance, long-wavelength VHF and UHF radars. These frequencies, used in early-warning radars, have too low-optical resolution* however to be any good at aiming guns or missiles. The B-2's "flying wing" shape is able to not-interfere with these wavelengths though, and hence hides from them. In that sense, this is somewhat interesting, if neutered for the reasons you mention.
*You can only localize the detection to a few sq hundred meters, even kms.
Here ya go:
1. a) "Steve Kerr's silence shows NBA-China relationship is league's third rail" - [https://www.nbcsports.com/bayarea/warriors/steve-kerrs-silen...]
b) [https://twitter.com/JamesHasson20/status/1181422479115456512]
3. "Opinion: It's time for LeBron James to speak out on China, regardless of Nike ties" - [https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/columnist/josh-peter/2...]
a core problem in the United States' institutions - Defense industry dysfunction.
You missed a word.
But to answer your specific suggestion for No. 1: No, I don't think Super PACs are near the Top 10 issues facing the United States' institutions. They might be in the Top 100.
Honestly, it's just a subtle misunderstanding due to how Anduril's product path blurs the lines between the products they sell now, and the structure of their company & goals long-term. Long-term, Anduril wants to be a defense co. that bids for and wins contracts with the Department of Defense and challenges the monopolies of Lockheed Martin et al. To do this, they had to find an MVP that let them develop technology & make money in a way that could be leveraged toward that goal in the future.
Border security works well for this, because a lot of the software & hardware they will build here is dual-use for defense and border security. Furthermore, selling technology to the border patrol is probably the closest sales problem in the world to selling to the U.S. military - Same regulatory framework, sales cycle, Congressional lobbying landscape, even product review. It's a stepping stone to selling full-blown defense tech, hence the mish-mash of terms.
Awesome!
Anduril is one of the few startups today I believe is solving a core problem in the United States' institutions - Defense industry dysfunction. It costs American taxpayers billions of dollars on weapons that under-perform at best and endanger American lives at worst.
Palmer correctly identifies some of the incentive issues with current defense contracts. Rather than working on contracts pre-defined by the DoD, which puts the US Treasury on the line for all cost over-runs and entangles project planning in Pentagon political intrigue, Anduril R&Ds technologies on their own dime, to their own specs, before trying to make a sale. High-risk, but one way to do it right today. He explains his vision more in this interview: https://twitter.com/micsolana/status/1087803794266550272
All journalism to the sufficiently informed looks like pathos. All journalism to the sufficiently uninformed looks like logos.
These court-cases have two worthy objectives: Correcting this behavior in pharmaceutical co.s in the future and compensating the states & people harmed in the past.
Incentivizing restraint and honest advertising is only possible by punishing executives, personally [1]. Especially those in sales.
And fair compensation is many, many times this number. So I fail to see how this is anything other than an injustice, and fear that it will take the pressure off of other court cases against opioid sellers.
Reading the book "Dreamland" [2] on the opioid crisis changed my life. Even as someone from a part of Ohio hurt by opioids, it's hard to imagine the venality of these people, the callousness of the Mexican drug dealers who swoop in behind them, and the magnitude of suffering their perfect storm concocts.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669453 [2] https://www.amazon.com/Dreamland-True-Americas-Opiate-Epidem...
Ah! Some good answers in the rest of this thread noting that this gun vaporizes its sabot - That's probably the biggest source of smoke
A combination of three things: 1) The flash is air in contact with the super-hot rail ionizing instantaneously from the heat, and becoming plasma. 2) Friction (From the projectile against both the rail itself, and air) producing vast amounts of heat, which then a) causes water vapor in the air to flash to steam b) produces smoke from burning metal
I am not sure how much of the smoke is from 2)b), because I'm assuming the surface materials are designed to minimize friction and therefore surface burning.
[1] https://www.quora.com/When-a-railgun-is-fired-where-does-the...
This is an important point, and I couldn't agree more.
This idea overwhelms me when I read the newest filings and indictments of pharmaceutical companies in the opioid crisis. A corporation, fundamentally, cannot "learn lessons" like people do. It is a collection of incentives, with men inside directed or manipulated by those incentives. If gently nudging 47,000 people a year to kill themselves with overdoses would create more revenue for the corporation, after lawsuit settlements, than not, they would likely do it all over again. Even if you change the men making the decisions - "Finding more moral men" is not a plan.
Executives must have skin in the game, because the possible upside to their career at the highest levels of American business are too great to hope they'll take a moral stand. The potential upside for Richard Sackler, and John Kapoor, and Steve Jobs is so high (Massive bonuses, stock prices), and the potential downside so low (They are fired, with a generous golden parachute), they are willing to take the chance they'll get away with it. The most likely outcome is that attorneys will get rich, and nothing much else.
The only solution to †his type of white collar crime and leadership malfeasance is to make executives, the individual human beings, feel a tinge of reptilian fear in their gut that they may go to prison and the livelihood of their families could be put in danger.
For a brilliant rant on the horrible, useless design of the Space Shuttle, it's hard to beat Idle Words: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm
As a coder of "various ability and background", I found that Hoon source code was a relaxing joy to read and write after a few weeks of dedicated study.
It is, believe it not, designed with readability as a first-class priority. However, a common meme in language design today is that "Code should read like prose." This sounds good, because it means languages are easy to learn. Who wants to learn a bunch of symbols and patterns and junk? I want to code (Python, JavaScript, etc.) now!
But when we program, we aren't dealing with the trivial knowledge English is efficient at exchanging in an email, or the subtly it portrays in a novel. We are talking to a computer. The ideas we explain to a computer are often much more complex than we can explain precisely with English in any reasonable amount of time, so complex we often lose ourselves in them.
Mathematicians and physicists gave up on making human language explain specific technical ideas long ago. Have you ever read a paper on cosmic topology or quantum field theory? There's a comforting padded bumper of English framing the ideas, but the reason the paper is published is in symbols which would appear to the uninitiated as "hundreds of lines of noise." The English is usually just an introduction.
I think Hoon is wonderful [1] because it has both power and predictability. Power lets you express complex ideas concisely and easily, while predictability lets you read and understand someone else's code without frustration. Perl is powerful because it's dense, but it does so at the cost of predictably. Mathematics symbols are terribly powerful, but wildly unpredictable [2]. Python is sort of powerful and sort of predictable. The seductiveness of English simulacra programming languages is that you often don't realize how much power you're giving up because it's just so relaxing to not think about symbols and patterns when your code has the predictability of an email.
Hoon's power is in the zoology of runes (Digraphs) and it's predictability is rooted in its homoiconicity. Every symbol on the keyboard is utilized to build powerful runes, each of which in turn is utilized to append predictable structure onto your AST. When you understand the basic patterns of these constructions and reductions, it's not hard to read someone else's library and understand it in an afternoon. I can't say the same for the Java SDKs I come across. [3]
I'm not saying it isn't inaccessible at first and doesn't take time to learn. I am saying it is worth it.
[1] It's my favorite language - It is just plain fun.
[2] That's why the English frame around a physics paper is there - It tells you what each symbol represents in this paper and what they're trying to do.
[3] The language design also includes several decisions to avoid the pratfalls of other homoiconic languages (Primarily the readability of Lisp), but those are explained in the docs.
Oh, Urbit! Where to begin?...
First of all, this is staggeringly brilliant. You should pay attention to it in the coming months. I am not sure if it's destined to be the future, but I sure as hell hope it is.
I had the privilege of interning at Tlon, the company working on Urbit's development, this summer. It owns most of the namespace (Personal cloud computer IP addresses, essentially.) and is where the architect of the system works full-time. They are funded, well enough, by VCs you know of. Urbit is not really launched yet though - We spent the summer doing a lot of work getting the network, file system, protocols, and application layer in "Industrial grade" shape, and I believe more of that is happening this fall.
Because the system is still unlaunched and the docs are being retooled, I imagine these pages are discombobulating. That's... expected. Urbit has a lot of odd ideas that take time to appreciate. However, if you do take the time to understand the motivation behind the design of everything from Hoon's appearance to the network protocol replacement for TCP to the vision for future social networks, you'll find some of the best and most complete computer science research done in decades in networks, systems, and functional programming. The essential idea is not an outlandish one - We need a new basis of computing and networking to build digital identities with, and 1970s system software is not up to the task.
It's unfortunate that ambition and a sense of humor can be misinterpreted as a joke today. For now, you'll just have to take my word for it [1] that these guys are deadly serious and have the technical chops to back up their ambition. Future documentation and applications built on the OS should soon make that more immediately evident.
[1] Or start reading the tutorials!
There's a (vitriolic) write up on "The Last Psychiatrist" blog which generalizes this to the idea of the "The Long Con" by discussing the Dove Beauty campaign [0]. It's a more thorough write-up, in part because The Last Psychiatrist says things the NYT can't, but also because they diverge off to examine why this marketing works and where else it's applied.
The climate change versus shareholder value debate aside, I would be angry that this representative was obviously trying to hijack the shareholding meeting discussion to make a political point or have me (Tim Cook) say something polarizing. They got the latter, but not in the form they hoped for.
Inequality not being fundamentally unjust does not imply it isn't a huge problem for society.
First of all, it makes it easy for the wealthy to lock the poor (and the rich) into their locations on the income graphs. The systems the wealthy can set in place are an impediment to a meritocracy by ensuring the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, whether that is through boarding schools and trust funds or the Drug War and a toothless minimum wage. If the resulting massive disparity in wages implies one thing, it's that our civilization is wasting a lot of untapped human productivity on the low end of the wealth graph.
Secondly, it creates social resentment, fragmentation, and stratification. These are just emotions and Sociology Major words, yes, but that doesn't mean they aren't real. If the people at the bottom of the ladder feel like they don't have the power to climb, a society can end very badly as its political process becomes more polarized and communities are segregated.
Finally, it creates large gaps not just in material wealth, but political. Whether you're a liberal or a conservative, you think either the Koch Brothers or George Soros are destroying America. Either way, it can be agreed that democracies are undermined by a few unelected individuals wielding huge amounts of power. Less income inequality means less political inequality.
Nothing you said is wrong, but it's unhelpful. It distracts from how important dealing with growing income inequality will be in the future by saying "The discourse... is frustrating to me, because it's not pedantically right." It might be necessary if sama was arguing against large wealth disparities in a post-poverty civilization, but that is not what we have. Like you said: Poverty is the problem. And while we have poverty, poverty and inequality are closely linked.
As always, there's an old and insightful pg essay on these economics: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
The trivial conclusion is that starting your own company is how to be accurately rewarded for your work. But that assumes there's no way to better measure employee performance. It seems like measuring it for engineers and programmers is an impossibly hard problem (At least, that's implied from all of the well-run organizations that have given up or failed miserably on quantizing performance over the years.). However, I would like to see some creative attempts at making teams better at this.
Although I haven't read the novel, it would be most meta irony if the article's author was missing the book's subtle societal criticism.
I agree with almost everything pg said in that essay. But I also agree that the the best economy of the future will (someday) include a minimum living wage like this.
That's because it's not a bill in pursuit of some Utopian equality: It's a survival bill. Giving someone $2,800 a month without explicitly taxing the rich to fund it is hardly an attempt at eliminating income inequality. I would call this type of wage a 'freedom-wage' more than anything else because it would give people (Like college students with mountains of debt or unskilled middle-age workers.) more economic freedom to do great things like start companies, learn new skills, and practice art. The goal here is survivability and freedom, not "fixing" massive inequality.
My first reaction at how public he is making his identity and why he disclosed those documents was that he is seeking fame and flattery. But it's actually the best thing to do.
By making sure the public knows who he is, where he is, and what he stands for Edward Snowden has (hopefully) protected himself from the more nefarious things American intelligence services may do to capture him by making them impractical for the sake of public relations. China would no doubt be upset if CIA agents nabbed him from a Hong Kong hotel. Plus, his fame gives an incentive to nations to give him political asylum if they want to make a political statement against the U.S.