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throwaway-1209 | 8 years ago | on: Stop Buying Things and Start Borrowing Them

That's what I do. If I need a tool temporarily, I just get it from eBay or Craigslist, and then unload it. I often make money when I resell. It's not much, but all in all I essentially rent things for free. This doesn't work for things that are very expensive, but for anything below a few thousand dollars, this will save you a ton of money.

throwaway-1209 | 8 years ago | on: Uber loses ground in US as rival Lyft accelerates

100% fake news. There's no way they actually have any ride data from either company to back up this claim. In fact there's another bit of equally fake news posted to HN right now that says that recent events have failed to put a dent into Uber marketshare. "Journalists" should stop making shit up, and instead stick to reporting facts.

throwaway-1209 | 8 years ago | on: Tesla Autopilot

It's memory + control driven with visual feedback, not much more. You don't have to solve anything if you already sorta know the solution, and can adjust it for the goal.

throwaway-1209 | 8 years ago | on: Tesla Autopilot

Dude, I work on high performance machine learning and machine vision 12 hours a day. You don't need to tell me it sucks, I know. But it's superhuman on some tasks already, and in a few short years, it'll be superhuman on a few more, and little by little it'll get there. All you get from that lidar is a depth map. You can do that without a lidar, using two or more cameras. If you also interpolate across a series of predictions, and have sensor fusion (which Tesla does, they also use radars and ultrasonic sensors) you can even make it robust. Truly, people who say it can't be done should not interrupt people who are doing it.

throwaway-1209 | 8 years ago | on: Tesla Autopilot

Sure, and it's not only cortex. Humans also know a lot about the world, and can predict things much better. There are areas in which humans are limited, however, such as reaction time, spectral sensitivity, the fact that humans can only see well in the center of where they're looking at and fake the rest of their visual field, etc. It's not at all clear to me that a human pair of eyeballs is better than 8 high quality, wide spectrum cameras feeding into the system at once.

That said, I think it's disingenuous of Tesla to call their system "autopilot" or imply autonomy of any kind when talking about their system. I will call something autopilot when it can drive me from door to door without me touching the wheel, in less than friendly weather conditions. Not drive in a straight line where it never rains.

throwaway-1209 | 8 years ago | on: Jeff Bezos: Request for ideas

Also known as the Merck that actually invents new drugs and rakes in almost three times the revenue of the German counterpart. I wonder if the fact that it's a US company has something to do with that. Hmm.

throwaway-1209 | 8 years ago | on: Jeff Bezos: Request for ideas

Our education system and business environment produces a hell of a lot more innovation (including pharma) than the rest of the world produces combined. The rest of the world then piggy backs on all that and invests diddly squat into R&D, all while being smug about their social safety net. Don't be so quick to dismiss the US way of doing things. While imperfect, it's not beyond repair either.

throwaway-1209 | 8 years ago | on: Jeff Bezos: Request for ideas

No. I'd love to see lower drug pricing in the US. One must understand, hovewer that this will cause the prices to rise everywhere else. Which is quite all right with me. About time those folks started paying their fair share. They might even get their own pharma research going if they have to pay through their nose like we do.

throwaway-1209 | 8 years ago | on: Jeff Bezos: Request for ideas

They have different cost structures and much higher taxes, and their healthcare couldn't exist without multi billion research efforts US healthcare consumer pays for. How much pharmaceutical innovation is there outside the US?

throwaway-1209 | 8 years ago | on: Jeff Bezos: Request for ideas

Just pool the money with Buffett and Gates, and do something jointly. Eradicate some deadly disease, cure cancer, something like that. Really bring those billions and project management skills to bear on it.

throwaway-1209 | 8 years ago | on: Jeff Bezos: Request for ideas

You seem to think money grows on trees. Your suggestions can't be implemented without taxing people like Bezos to death. In fact, I'm pretty sure they can't be implemented at all, no matter who you "bribe".

throwaway-1209 | 8 years ago | on: AMD EPYC 7000 CPUs: 32 cores, 64 threads, 8 memory channels, 128 PCIe lanes

I disagree. It is _vital_ for cloud providers to keep Intel's feet to the fire. Things got so bad a few years back, Google started porting its entire software stack to ppc64le, which is far less convenient as a platform than amd64. I think we will totally see EPYC deployment in data centers if AMDs benchmarks hold up. You may not even know they're there, but I can guarantee they'll see a significant traction.
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