antimagic

You have to read the next article (it's the link at the bottom), which then describes in detail how one driver can indeed remove traffic jams. The first article explains how traffic jams form, so you can understand in the second article why a certain behaviour fixes the problem.

A tactic particularly well-loved by those with small government tendencies for everything except the military. Not only do you get to hide exactly how that money you keep giving to the military is being spent, but you then get to use the same budget as an argument when claiming how inefficient government is...

Some dogs can be trained to herd sheep in a remarkably precise way, with just hand gestures and whistles to control them. There are plenty of people on this planet, born with mental defects, that would be incapable of learning to do this. Nevertheless, "People are smarter than dogs" is a usefully true statement, even whilst not being 100% correct. It certainly communicates the idea better than: "People, after having attained a certain level of mental development after birth, and not counting those born with mental defects or receiving cerebral injuries after birth, are smarter than most dogs, putting aside for the moment the possibility of a dog being born with a mutation allowing it to reason at a much higher level than is usually seen in the dog population".

One version of that sentence concisely articulates the core idea. The other, whilst more correct, hides the core idea under a large number of sub-clauses trying to deal with unusual corner cases.

To bring this back to the technical world, this debate is very similar to the way that programming language designers go to great lengths to try and help programmers right error handling code that doesn't get in the way of understanding the nominal case - it turns out that this is an exceptionally hard problem to solve though when dealing with computers because they are so precise. Thankfully human brains can be a lot more forgiving if we so desire (see the Principal of Charity mentioned previously in this thread).

Well, in investing there is the concept of the sophisticated investor, where you're supposed to be capable of determining all by yourself if you're being had, provided all of the relevant information is being provided. Caveat emptor and all of that, so typical consumer protection type laws don't apply. I believe the idea behind this is to allow investors to make risky decisions, because that's kind of what professional investors are supposed to do. Still sucks when your superannuation disappears because a so-called sophisticated investor proves to be anything but.

Rental demand is fairly inelastic though - everyone needs a roof over their head. The main force keeping prices down is competition, not the fact that landlords are being kind. If land taxes are increased, then all landlords will raise their prices, and the market will bear it - the other choice is to end up living in the street.

The advantage of the LVT is that in theory the market could bear the price increase because there will be a corresponding drop in the salary tax that most renters are paying. The idea is that the government effectively takes a large slice of the profit from rent, instead of it all going to landlords. The problem of course is that this creates a disincentive for landlords to invest in property, reducing supply, and now we go back to high prices because of market forces.

There is no simple solution to the high price of land, except by increasing supply or reducing demand. In other words, building more housing (which requires us to encourage landlords, not discourage them), or reduce the population. Just think, in a world with half the population of today, we would drastically reduce the percentage of salary devoted to housing. Not bad really.

So what, you're postulating that US citizens justly deserve to be killed by police 79 time more than their British counterparts? I mean the police is only supposed to kill to protect their, or a bystander's, life. We know from the few times that police-caused deaths have been caught on video in the US that this is often not at all the case. The guy shot down as he walks down the middle of the road. The guy who's neck gets broken in a police van, the young kid shot down in a park because he's playing with a toy gun. The guy that is choked to death because he's selling loose cigarettes in the street.

Those are all recent cases that I am personally aware of, as a non-US citizen, living in Europe. I'm sure there have been plenty of others.

So yes, not all police killings in the US are undeserved, but there sure are plenty that are, and that is what those statistics are showing.

Ahhh, a most timely article, from my perspective. I've recently being writing a computer game for my first computer, which was a contemporary of the trash-80 (http://www.compucolor.org/emu/ccemu.html). The guy that made the emulator was working for NVIDIA last time I talked to him, and he thoughtfully provided most of the programming manuals for Compucolor II on the site.

Why? Well I was mostly expired from a story in "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" where he talks about being bored with physics, and he gets back into it by playing around with toy problems that he had to work out from first principles (the way that the wobble in a spinning plate precesses around the axis). So I've started programming in an emulator of this old 1980s computer. It seems to be working for me too - I'm finding myself to be much more engaged in my day job since I've started.

It's not about BASIC though - it really is about the fact that computers literally booted into a REPL. That REPL being a BASIC REPL was probably something that set people back - I remember having a really hard time grokking how the computer knew in what order Pascal programmes had to be executed.

The thing is, that's not really true. Developers made it possible for advertisers to insert their adverts into web resources. Advertisers decided to use that power to track users through cookies, tracking pixels, localStorage and various Javascript tricks. Yes, there were no doubt a few developers working for the ad companies, but they are far outweighed by the mass of developers that work for content sites.

So, you think your partner is cheating on you with their ex. You know they got a taxi from your apartment last Sunday at 6pm, you look up the data, and sure enough, the taxi went to the ex's address, and not home as your partner claimed.

Or, you arrive at work late, claiming that you stopped off at a client's before heading in to work, but your employer can now verify that you actually got the taxi from your home address.

I'm assuming in these examples that you just need to know pick-up OR drop-off - if you need both, then I agree with you that it's not much of a concern.

You're getting cause and effect back to front - Musk started Tesla because he wanted to play a real part in reducing emissions. He is on record as saying so. So arguing for a carbon tax is just another effort in that direction, not an attempt to bolster his business.

Which is fair enough. It does make me wonder though if you tried representing the duration in base 4 of pi, or something like that, whether you couldn't create something that sounded quite nice. Probably not, but I admit that if it was something I could whip up easily, I would do the experiment :)

I downvoted you, but I thought I'd explain why - I don't think it's reasonable to characterise this as childish. Government surveillance is something which our industry is the best positioned to speak out against. This type of thing seems to be clearly political speech, and not a prank.

This type of arrangement does actually exist already. The BBC in the UK, and the ABC in Australia are both openly critical of governments - I know that the political right in Australia finds the ABC overly biased to the left, and the political left finds it overly biased to the right (although the right seems to be a bit more serious about this - they routinely try to hamstring the ABC when in power, whereas the left tends to increase funding).

Anyway, the point is that publicly funded broadcasters can and do criticise their governments.

The French default to "left-pondian" when speaking English, much to my Australian-living-in-Paris chagrin. Most aren't even aware that there is a difference between English English and American English. One step up from that are those that aware that there is a difference, to the point that they actually think that the two are very nearly distinct languages, and that people from England may have trouble understanding Americans. After that you have the people that actually understand the true difference between the two versions of the language, but even they rarely understand that the US is actually the exception, and that pretty much all other English-speaking countries use English spelling (well, there is Canada, which decided to sit on the fence between the two, I suppose).

Stephen Pinker. Just about the only person from a humanities field that left me in awe of his intellect when I saw him speak.

That's not entirely true. Grasshopper is entirely capable of hovering, there are plenty of videos of it doing precisely that. The Falcon 9 landings that have been attempted are a different story because they actually weigh much less at the time of landing because they have burned off most of their fuel. This makes the thrust to weight ratio much higher, making hovering impossible.

The important difference between this New Shepherd flight and those Falcon 9 tests is that the Falcon 9s launched payload to orbit. They burned all their fuel, leaving them with the incredibly difficult slam-landing manoeuver to manage at the end. They have gone close, very close, but have not yet got things entirely right.

So, although this was an impressive technological demonstration, it's a long way from demonstrating a relaunch capability. I look forward to seeing new developments.

You see, this is the thing that kills me when thinking about the quantum world. The Many Worlds interpretation is so clean and obvious, except for one thing - it requires creating a new universe for each quantum entanglement event. Gah!

Of course that does make me think about forking processes and copy-on-write, and the idea that our reality is just a simulation in a computer and that maybe creating new universes is not as expensive as we might at first think...

It wasn't really a very impressive prediction though - if it even was one. I mean, the technical details are all wrong. The only correct aspect was how people would use video-conf. But I can't help thinking that this is just an encapsulation of a common human desire to connect with friends and family, rather than a prediction of technology (other than perhaps, if we're feeling generous, to note that he correctly anticipated that technology would eventually be able to do this).

To look at it another way, I wouldn't credit the writers of Star Trek for 'predicting' a transporter if one ever gets made. Or warp engines, or pretty much any of the high-tech gadgets in the series. They aren't predicting them, they are simply stating that these would be very cool things to have. The fact that sometimes engineering catches up to human desire is at the same time remarkable, and completely normal.

The thing is though that right from the start the calculations make the assumption that the solar panels are sized in such a way that they capture just the right amount of energy over the course of the year. That means that you need to store every bit of energy that isn't immediately used, because it will be needed later.

Back in the real world you wouldn't design your system that way. Instead, you would look at your worst case scenario - mid-winter, and calculate how many solar panels you would need to capture a day's worth of energy in one day. This would also tell you how large your battery would need to be. A prudent engineer would probably introduce a factor of 2 or so both in the size of the panel installation and the size of the battery to allow for a sequence of unusually dark days, but the multiples being talked about in the article are just ridiculous.

Yup, sounds a bit like a project I did a while back - I had a C/C++ bindings generator that took an XML file and generated the C/C++ code to expose a C/C++ class to Javascript. So of course the logical thing for me to do was write the thing in Ruby.

That said, all code-generation tools - straight up generators, compilers, whatever - are a mindbending experience. Keeping track of whether a variable is available at generation time or runtime is trickier than I initially expected.

You'd almost certainly lose that wager though. There are a lot of French lawyers out there! OK, I'm being a bit tongue in cheek, you're talking (I think!) about people actually needing a lawyer, but you know what, those lawyers must be doing something, so I'm thinking that people interact with them a lot. Certainly I know that I personally have three separate friends (ie they don't know each other) that are lawyers, and I definately didn't seek lawyers out amongst my friends!

"This is incredibly bad"

It is? Please explain why other people should be prepared to go to gaol or businesses should pay heavy fines to protect my personal information from legal(1) government requests? Particularly when I apparently don't care enough about the privacy of said information to the point that I allow it to be stored in the US, where apparently these sorts of shenanigans go on?

Edit: (because I'm being downvoted to death, which I don't think the comment deserves)

These companies agree that our data should be private and protected. They are not prepared to take heavy penalties to protect those rights. Anger should not be directed at these companies, but rather at the completely fucked up US government approach to privacy. At the end of the day, whether these companies fight and get fined out of existence, or comply, the government will still end up getting your data. That's the problem, and it's the US government that has betrayed people, not the companies listed by this stupid site.

1. I'm personally dubious as to the legality of these orders, but for now the US judiciary don't seem to be opposing the executive on this one, at least for the time being, so hey, I guess it's legal...

That is just not true. The Church was front and centre in the French Revolution. The whole problem was that the first two estates (Church and Nobility) didn't want to cede power to the third estate (the Commons). Removing the King was the only path the Commons found to get their share of the power (the King was actually well-loved by his subjects, at least at the start of the Revolution, in 1789). Many churches were severely vandalised during the Revolution, and Church-imposed taxes were banned.

So yeah, without getting into the weeds, the Church was very much one of the major causes of the Revolution, and it lost plenty of it's authority as a result of the Revolution.

Ahhh, premature optimisation! You've optimised for your time, but have you optimised for the best efficiency at the company level? Ok, so your precious flow doesn't get interrupted, but the person that had a question that needed your input now has to wait around until you deign to respond.

You know who doesn't work that way? Fabrice Bellard. If you're lucky enough to be his co-worker, you can sit down next to him and ask a question at any time, and he will stop what he's doing and answer you. Then he'll get back to work.

The attitude you expressed above (and it's far from uncommon here on HN) is just an example of developers wanting to be treated like special snowflakes. I do not believe this is a desirable trait for someone working in a company.

But that's not at all the message "and that has made all the difference"... It's not that your choices don't make any difference, but that you make them without knowledge of where they really lead, and that you can't go back if you discover that you've made an error.

I have very fond memories of just how blazingly fast Turbo Pascal was at compiling on my Mac. It stunned me every time. I remember spending most of one summer writing a text adventure game with it, based in the Australian Gold Rush. It even had NPCs which was quite advanced for text adventures of the day (I think the only NPCs in adventure games that I had encountered up to that point were those in the Hobbit, and of course the bloody thief in Zork (although he wasn't really an NPC, but was implemented as a bunch of semi-random encounters)...

Good times. In particular, I remember having to implement my own strings, because for a text adventure you often want to have access to strings longer than 255 characters...

Sadly, I never managed to make the jump from writing console applications with TP to writing proper Mac GUI apps. But "Inside Macintosh" cost an absolute fortune at the time (for a 10 year-old kid at any rate), so I ended up scraping enough money together to buy another text book whose name escapes me. I must have read the first few chapters about a million times - they talked about handles and graphics ports etc, but I could never get any code from them to run in TP (I think they were assuming that you would be using MPW?).

Which brings me to the point of this long rambling message - did TP really support graphics programming on the Mac? I know my version of TP was an official bought copy, so we had the manual, but I don't remember ever seeing anything that explained GUI programming in there.

OK, this is one of things where you have to be very precise with the terminology. HLS does enforce the use of MPEG-2 Transport streams, but it does not force the use of the video encoding that is packaged in the stream. It is very typical (in fact it's the norm) to see HLS using H264 for the actual encoding work, and MPEG2 TS is actually a pretty decent specification for throwing around video streams.

I don't know that you can really say that DASH is more technologically neutral. I mean what are you saying, that HLS is not technology neutral because it forces you to use an MPEG specification, but if you opt to use an MPEG specification up-front, that's neutral?

Anyway, as someone that writes the client code for these things, I much prefer the HLS approach. If you go the DASH approach, you get into one of several potential messes. Either you have to say that you're only implementing one specific profile, in which case content providers complain that you're not supporting their chosen profile, or you have to write an absolutely massive client that can accept anything thrown at it.

Apple's affection for HLS stems from this same reasoning in my opinion. They too are more concerned about the client side - they want to keep the format simple for clients to handle, so that they don't have to bloat all of their code handling all of the different options. Because don't forget, the servers don't have to deal with this complexity - they choose which bits they want to use and go with it. Clients have to be able to handle everything in the spec correctly.

Are you suggesting that Vim-lovers and Emacs afficianados are actually very similar? Perish the thought!

The event isn't just "there was a coin flip". The event was "there is a coin flip and I have been woken up". For this event, two thirds of the time the coin flip will have been tails.

Halfers forget that there is an extra piece of information available "I have been woken up". SB knows that one third of the time she has been woken up it is because the coin flip was heads, and two thirds of the time it was tails.

Anyway, this is a stupid "paradox". It is extremely simple to build a simulation of SB being woken up and coin tosses, and if you do so, you get the clear answer - 1/3. There is no sampling issue or other trick that makes this simulation hard to write correctly...