danweber | 13 years ago | on: Perl/Linux, a Linux distribution where all programs are written in Perl
No one has asked yet, so I guess I have to: is the Perl binary written in Perl?
danweber's comments
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Perl/Linux, a Linux distribution where all programs are written in Perl
Anything I would use Perl for, I use Ruby instead.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Facebook frees up 60% more shares today
A fall when a bunch of people can suddenly sell is a normal thing.
And those insiders should sell parts of their positions. They are very heavily invested in FB and need to diversify, even if they believe FB is a very wise investment. Many insiders probably have more than 90% of their portfolio in FB stock.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness
All of this "giving away" of stuff has stopped our society from reinventing the wheel.
Unfortunately, the people "giving away" spend a lot of time reinventing fantastically-different but only-very-marginally-better wheels. Every week I see on HN about some new language or framework someone has invented that fragments the market even more. If you aren't being compensated in dollars, being compensated with being "the inventor of X" can come close, so there's a big supply of this.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness
Several times I've been a company that says "the way the rest of the industry does X is stupid."
Sometimes we broke the rest of the market, sometimes we captured a really big piece, sometimes we had to give up and do what they all do.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident
"Missing stop signs" is one place where a google car would be great, since they pre-map the area and would know a stop sign has disappeared. Knowing that would cause them to slow down and be even more careful.
Autonomous cars never get distracted, have 360 degree vision, look at all things all the time, and can react in tens of milliseconds versus hundreds of milliseconds. I'd trust that over a "professional driver."
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident
There's a classic science fiction story that I cannot remember now where people do exactly that.
If it becomes a problem, the car can transmit images of the jaywalkers to the police.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident
The people doing this have talked about how their autonomous car met another company's autonomous car. There didn't seem to be a problem.
Really, when there are more autonomous cars on the road, each and every one will get better from their neighbors. They can directly share the data they see and what they are doing. The network effects will be huge.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident
The 4-way stop was something they had to change from the ideal setup. The google car was obeying the law and waiting its turn and never getting it. They made it get more aggressive the longer it waits and now it gets through them just fine.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident
I think $10,000 is a big over-estimate, but even that would be spread out over the life of the car. I'd happily pay $1000 a year to not have to worry about driving.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident
Remember that the "5%" of the time you use your car is probably the same "5%" of the time every one else wants to use their car, i.e. rush hours.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident
From what I know it's always known-course. If you were to get a google car today for your commute (you can't), you would first drive to and from work yourself, probably more than once, so it can map everything.
Knowing where there should be a stop sign and traffic lights significantly reduces risks. The computer still needs to be able to learn when new ones appear, of course.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident
Driving at night and the rain will probably be where autonomous cars really outshine humans. Lidar systems don't care if you are wearing all black during a night at new moon.
Snow is much harder for the time being. A snow drift falling off a car can make a google car think a cooler has appeared in the road.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident
Google's algorithm (which Strum seems to be pollinating everywhere -- and good, because the old algorithms were failing DARPA tests) is to pre-map the road. The car knows exactly where it is and what is supposed to be there, which it also compared with what it sees now.
How will it react to a bicyclist running a red stoplight and into the car's path, when the car has a green light?
It will stop. In fact, the "failure mode" of self-driving cars will be how pedestrians can bully them by stepping in front of them so they stop.
When the car comes across kids playing football/street hockey/baseball in the street, will it stop for them?
There is already video of this. The radar/lidar isn't good enough to see a baseball, but it's definitely good enough to see a kid.
Will these cars have systems to react when they take damage?
It will probably pull over and stop if something is wrong.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident
That doesn't seem right to me. A person driving 10K a year will hit 300,000 miles over the course of 30 years. Does the average person really have less than 1 accident every 30 years? Especially when they are younger?
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Please turn on two-factor authentication
I've got a 200 message/month plan from AT&T for $5 a month. My only complaint is that I can't share messages across the two lines on the account so each gets billed $5. (Also, no data plan.)
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Please turn on two-factor authentication
That is very helpful. I'm going to be proposing this to work very soon thanks to you.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Please turn on two-factor authentication
Back when cell phones weren't ubiquitous, I once worked at a start-up where one of the really rich technical leads thought it was unfair that he got charged when people called him on his cell phone. I guess he thought that the peons who could only afford land lines were supposed to subsidize him. Which I could have forgiven as plain old selfishness, but he also constantly complained about how unfair society was to the poor.
That specific combination of attributes still bugs me.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: Please turn on two-factor authentication
I think most people are aware that the passwords saved in their browser are, well, saved in their browser, and if someone unkind gains access to the browser they gain access to all the sites with saved passwords.
danweber | 13 years ago | on: The weakest link by far is Apple
I think "Security questions" need to be completely destroyed and the earth salted. Then we have a long talk about them before bringing them back in a very careful, limited format.
Bank Of America is horrible in this. First off, if someone else tries to log in using your username 3 times, it locks you out of your account. You need access to your email to get back in.
But it demands you re-create three security questions after that. I chose a simple username so other people stumble across it a lot. So I have to go through this process frequently, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.
How securely are they storing this PII? Probably not at all. I try to give the exact same questions and answers every time to limit what BoA knows about me, but someone compromising by BoA account might be able to learn that information and use it to cascade attacks into other services. (They display by secret questions and their answers to me in plaintext.)
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