yohui

And current HN discussion (older than this one by a minute): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17622252

post-quantum key agreement experiments in Chrome

Link for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16811554

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16659656

The original HN discussion about the Uber accident is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16619917

There was also a previous discussion about the report that Uber may not be at fault, though unlike this post the linked article was not the original source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16624814

In the /r/SelfDrivingCars discussion RIGradStudent pointed out that the article's statement about the Uber car going 38mph in a 35mph zone may be a typo, since Street View shows a 45mph speed limit sign: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/85ozqr/exc...

According to the article:

From viewing the videos, “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Moir said.

That wouldn't affect LIDAR, would it? The safety driver may not have been able to avoid the collision, but what about the self-driving car itself? I would like to know more before ruling out Uber's fault.

Police have clarified that the victim was walking her bike across the street: https://twitter.com/AngieKoehle/status/975824484409077760

On the other hand, it mentions a bicycle, but also says the victim was walking, which I find odd

The police clarified that the victim was walking her bike across the street: https://twitter.com/AngieKoehle/status/975824484409077760

Yeah, the police clarified that she was walking her bike across the street: https://twitter.com/AngieKoehle/status/975824484409077760

Yeah, that's the real question. Especially since, according to the article, Swarm was already planning to make their future satellites larger after the smaller design was rejected. Why jeopardize that by launching the previously rejected units?

perfect is the enemy of good enough

Funnily enough, that's also how the original article described the opposition to the Authors Guild settlement. As it turned out, killing the Google Books project didn't really move us closer to copyright reform.

It's not clear to me inteleng is objecting to any possible religious connotations, so much as saying that astrobiology's success is far from assured and that much work needs to be done to prevent progress from being derailed.

While a good step, this only makes up for a portion of what the settlement would have allowed. (Most obviously, it appears this only covers books from a 20 year period and it takes more work to ascertain that the books are not being sold.)

Moreover, this does not contradict the idea that the Authors Guild settlement could have complemented public domain efforts. Even today some of the books saved on the Internet Archive were retrieved via Google Books: https://archive.org/details/googlebooks&tab=about

That's great for material that's public domain or out of copyright, but the Authors Guild settlement could have digitized and made accessible orphan works that are still under copyright. It would have complemented the public domain projects, not supplanted them.

But instead academic opponents of the deal seriously thought they would have better luck pursuing copyright reform in Congress (!), and helped kill the settlement. Of course, in reality Congress did no such thing, and so the chance to rescue orphan works was lost.

It's frustrating how the opposition was so painfully naive. As the article says, it was so clearly a case of "perfect being the enemy of the good." The following paragraphs deconstruct the sorry state of affairs that resulted:

The irony is that so many people opposed the settlement in ways that suggested they fundamentally believed in what Google was trying to do. One of Pamela Samuelson’s main objections was that Google was going to be able to sell books like hers, whereas she thought they should be made available for free. (The fact that she, like any author under the terms of the settlement, could set her own books’ price to zero was not consolation enough, because “orphan works” with un-findable authors would still be sold for a price.) In hindsight, it looks like the classic case of perfect being the enemy of the good: surely having the books made available at all would be better than keeping them locked up—even if the price for doing so was to offer orphan works for sale. In her paper concluding that the settlement went too far, Samuelson herself even wrote, “It would be a tragedy not to try to bring this vision to fruition, now that it is so evident that the vision is realizable.”

Many of the objectors indeed thought that there would be some other way to get to the same outcome without any of the ickiness of a class action settlement. A refrain throughout the fairness hearing was that releasing the rights of out-of-print books for mass digitization was more properly “a matter for Congress.” When the settlement failed, they pointed to proposals by the U.S. Copyright Office recommending legislation that seemed in many ways inspired by it, and to similar efforts in the Nordic countries to open up out-of-print books, as evidence that Congress could succeed where the settlement had failed.

Of course, nearly a decade later, nothing of the sort has actually happened. “It has got no traction,” Cunard said to me about the Copyright Office’s proposal, “and is not going to get a lot of traction now I don’t think.” Many of the people I spoke to who were in favor of the settlement said that the objectors simply weren’t practical-minded—they didn’t seem to understand how things actually get done in the world. “They felt that if not for us and this lawsuit, there was some other future where they could unlock all these books, because Congress would pass a law or something. And that future... as soon as the settlement with Guild, nobody gave a shit about this anymore,” Clancy said to me.

It certainly seems unlikely that someone is going to spend political capital—especially today—trying to change the licensing regime for books, let alone old ones. “This is not important enough for the Congress to somehow adjust copyright law,” Clancy said. “It’s not going to get anyone elected. It’s not going to create a whole bunch of jobs.” It’s no coincidence that a class action against Google turned out to be perhaps the only plausible venue for this kind of reform: Google was the only one with the initiative, and the money, to make it happen. “If you want to look at this in a raw way,” Allan Adler, in-house counsel for the publishers, said to me, “a deep pocketed, private corporate actor was going to foot the bill for something that everyone wanted to see.” Google poured resources into the project, not just to scan the books but to dig up and digitize old copyright records, to negotiate with authors and publishers, to foot the bill for a Books Rights Registry. Years later, the Copyright Office has gotten nowhere with a proposal that re-treads much the same ground, but whose every component would have to be funded with Congressional appropriations.

China is less homogenous than you might think, and Japan has groups that face discrimination too even if the divisions are less obvious to Western eyes. And people do criticize Japan's relatively xenophobic attitudes.

More to the point, even if you were correct about their racial homogeneity that would not be a model that the United States can or should seek to emulate.

Good tip. I would add that maxresdefault.jpg returns a higher resolution image, e.g.: https://img.youtube.com/vi/HlxLo2sMnXg/maxresdefault.jpg

I was interested to learn that, though the "OP1" processor in the Samsung Chromebook Plus is manufactured by Rockchip, the "OP" brand belongs to Google and is used for ARM CPUs optimized for Chromebooks: https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/22/14691396/google-chromeboo...

True, the continent of Europe (10.2 million km^2) is larger than the United States (9.8 million km^2), but the context suggests wskinner meant a comparable geopolitical entity such as the EU.

The US covers roughly twice as much area as the EU (4.5 million km^2), which includes most of the countries we're talking about. If we want to add the rest of continental Europe (mainly western Russia), we might also add the rest of continental North America (mainly Canada).

I think you mean this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631084

The Google cache link didn't work. F-droid.org loads fine for me, but if it's not working for others here's an archive.org snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20171019193128/https://f-droid.o...

Also being discussed in the thread "Alphabet’s CapitalG Leads $1B Round in Lyft": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15508603

Apple and Valve did announce at WWDC a few months ago that SteamVR would support Macs: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/06/steamvr-is-coming-to-...

I think DK2 works with SteamVR on PC. Not sure if it'll be possible to get DK2 working with SteamVR on Mac.

3. Two finger touchpad scroll doesn't work on Android apps for scrolling -- painful as heck when Wikipedia links open in the Android app in laptop mode

I think that's a bug with the Wikipedia app. Touchpad scrolling seems to work in most Android apps. The Firefox app also had this bug, but they fixed it.

If such fears are a factor, perhaps politicians should consider that even if they succeed domestically that won't stop geopolitical rivals such as China from pursuing AI, backed by state funding and with no limits on data collection.

This thread is the digital equivalent of why every attempt so far to set up a sane ID system in the US has floundered, leaving us stuck with the worst possible solution, SSNs.

I don't think generic hate would help you get ahold of sonic equipment. A plausible sounding theory I've heard (and I stress that it's total speculation) is that someone was trying to spy on the diplomats but miscalibrated their ultrasonic eavesdropping device, turning the effects harmful.

Parent comment is talking about the cost of compliance, not fines for non-compliance.

Previous discussion from yesterday based on the original WSJ article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15092139

As you probably know, that's impossible since fossil fuels (as the name suggests) are formed from the remains of prehistoric organisms. Since the Moon is lifeless, it has no fossil fuels.

But I wouldn't mind if the moon did experience a resource rush (unless it sparked a conflict). At least we would finally get to see a moon base.

The CIA is an independent agency, not part of State or Defense or any other executive department.

You can also view Figure 8 online: http://make.girls.moe/news-img/fixed_noise.jpg

But as the online article states, that figure represents a case where the model is explicitly set to "generate images [which] have similar major visual features with different attribute combinations": http://make.girls.moe/#/news

So some degree of repetition is to be expected, since you've turned off random noise. And despite that the images do still exhibit some variation if you look closely.